


lightning strikes at sunset

by taylorswift



Category: Actor RPF, Marvel Cinematic Universe RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Non-Famous, Bad Weather, F/M, Friends to Lovers, I Will Go Down With This Ship, I'm trying not to overdo it but I know I probably will so here's your advance apology, Idk why I wrote this but HERE IT IS, In the amazing race of updating one of the 9 fics in progress this one beat them all, Lizzie comes close to meeting her maker, Mild Sexual Content, One day I'll write the companion piece of what went down in the hotel room but that day isn't today, One word to describe my writing as of late: THERAPY, Resolved Sexual Tension, Sebbo the Starfish Origin Story, Summer Vacation, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, Tumblr Prompt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-16
Updated: 2019-07-12
Packaged: 2020-05-07 11:03:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 27,889
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19208071
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/taylorswift/pseuds/taylorswift
Summary: Three hundred thirty-four days out of the year, a scattered group of people across the country do life as they normally would — go to work, attempt to have social lives, pay taxes, try to keep their heads above the water. The remaining thirty days are spent on the North Carolinian coast putting their lives on hold, reconnecting with one another, and shedding all of their troubles in the ocean water until July 1st rolls around and demands they take them back. 2019's trip will be no different. Except it is.ORthe summer vacation au where the unpredictable weather is its own character and all of scarlett's perfectly laid plans go awry.





	1. came here looking for another excuse to run away

**Author's Note:**

> ...why yes, i _am_ a lunatic, thanks for asking! this idea was brought to you by a few things: a post on tumblr (which i will link here assuming that i can uncover it once again), my family's annual vacation to myrtle beach in south carolina that always winds up being sixteen shades of interesting (this year was no exception to the bunch with honorable mentions of my grandma scaring the SHIT out of me at 1am, mine and my mom's stalker on the beach, and "bold shrimp"), strangers by the jonas brothers, and amanda. i'm really sorry if this sucks, honestly. i just have a LOT OF IDEAS and i'm trying not to reinvent the wheel, y'all feel me? anyways, thanks to all of you for putting up with me. you're the best people in my life.
> 
> feedback is how i keep this place up and running, so comments on your way out are more than appreciated (and how i talk to you guys so like, come say hi). chapter title comes from the jonas brothers' "strangers" (wow what a surprise). you can find me on twitter @emswifts, instagram @strrlights and tumblr @nvtasha, where i will greet you with open arms and an overabundance of fangirl behavior. happy reading xx

There are two kinds of people in the world: people who plan their days out by the hour, and people who wouldn’t be able to make a schedule of the hours in which they’d be awake. If ever asked to categorize herself, Scarlett would be a planner person every day of the week and twice on Sunday.

Every Christmas, Hunter buys her a Day Designer planner that she swears by, the book affectionately referred to as the J-Bible. In it are client meetings, phone numbers, passwords, what juice cleanse she was up to try next, due dates of SoulCycle class payments, the results of her Myers-Brigg personality test and emergency contact information and the literal layout of her life from January to December. If the J-Bible goes anywhere, Scarlett’s entire person is close behind. If not, it’s safe to presume there are only seconds between normalcy and the world falling from orbit.

There’s a date that’s circled in the J-Bible every year, and this year it’s circled several times in orange Sharpie. June first, the only box in the monthly spread that is marked while the rest of the month remains clean and untouched. An anomaly for the J-Bible’s standards, but not abnormal for Scarlett in the slightest.

June is the one month in the year that keeps her glued together in between all eleven others. June is the month where she tells clients she’s unavailable without exception, the month where Maggie and Pancake temporarily move in with her mom or Hunter, the month where she stops being Scarlett Johansson, somebody, and steps into the shoes of _just Scarlett._

In order to do that, though, preparation is required. Preparation requires planning. Lots of it.

Penciled in on May thirtieth after a follow-up dinner with a client is a late night rerun of Friends serving as background noise as she attempts to pack up her life for a month, wine glass in one hand and cell phone tucked between her cheek and shoulder.

“How many bathing suits are you bringing?” she huffs into the phone, staring into her terrifyingly barren swimwear drawer.

“Bathing suits?” repeats Lizzie on the other line, clicking her tongue as she thinks. “I dunno, three? Four?”

“That’s _it?”_

“What, did a new memo drop saying I need one for every day of the week?” The sarcasm in her voice is heavy, Scarlett rolling her eyes. “Fifty bucks and evading trash duty says that at minimum, one of the guys will bring a singular pair of swim trunks to last the month.”

“I’m not the type to bet when I know I’ll lose,” Scarlett reminds her, scratching the top of her head. “That just doesn’t seem like very much. We’re there for a month.”

“Scar,” Lizzie says, slow and even. “It’s a vacation. Don’t overthink it.”

“You’ve met me, haven’t you?”

“Back before you shaved above the kneecap and dyed your hair every six weeks.”

“So you ought to know how well I’ll follow that tidbit of advice.”

“I swear to god, Johansson, if I see that goddamned planner so much as peek out from the bottom of your suitcase, I’m throwing it in the ocean and forcing you to ruin one of your three swimsuits in order to go fetch it.”

“You will do no such thing if you want to avoid a fate of sleeping in the bathtub,” Scarlett sings forebodingly into the receiver.

Lizzie snorts. “Like Hemi would ever give up his digs.”

“You really think three will be enough?” Scarlett asks again, still apprehensive.

In her ear, Lizzie lets out a long-drawn sigh. “Yes, Scarly, three is plenty. And if it’s not, we’ll be in a beach town. It’s not as though bathing suits will be hard to come by.”

“What would I do without ‘ya, doodle?”

“Be a shell of a human who relied on the Magic 8 Ball for all your life decisions.”

“Don’t you knock it until you try.”

“I presume you’ve done enough trying it in this lifetime to cover you and me both.”

A friend from the college days, Lizzie identifies as one of the People-with-a-capital-P that Scarlett has found herself bound to for (apparently) the rest of fucking time. There are ten, sans herself, in total; it all started when there were just six of them. Robert, Mark, the Chrises, Jeremy, and Scarlett.

Despite majoring in entirely different things, they all found themselves in the same seminar class that their university required for graduation. Scarlett and Chris Evans had been juniors, the others seniors, unexplainably all banding together the way college kids did when thrown in a mix. For them, the strength in numbers had been crucial in surviving all the philosophy gab that went straight over their heads. Mondays and Wednesdays were their days during that fateful semester for the six of them to rally at a local coffeehouse for hours at a time comparing notes, trying to fill in each other’s blanks – separate, they may not have had much, but together they had at least eighty percent of the big idea – work on presentations, and mostly let off steam.

Robert and Mark were the engineering majors barely keeping afloat in their internships, Chris Hemsworth complained a lot about how his interning station dictated every last inch of his physical appearance because _eye candy_ , Evans couldn’t figure out how to pass calculus with a C if it meant his own life, Jeremy constantly had some sorority girl on the ropes out to ruin his life, and all of the boys remained useless in talking Scarlett down from the biweekly crises of her spewing dreams of dropping out and becoming a pole dancer.

That was fall semester. Seminar class being long over, the six of them still kept to their tradition of meeting on Mondays and Wednesdays during the spring semester solely to bitch (Evans had made a stiff argument towards them picking up crocheting or knitting so they could aptly call the excursions a bitch-n’-stitch). Spring semester was the same semester Scarlett met Elizabeth in one of her accounting classes. Albeit a freshman, Lizzie was the closest thing to a life ring Scarlett could find drowning in a sea of testosterone. She’d all but dragged Lizzie by her hair to their meetings at the first given opportunity.

As she’d suspected, Lizzie fell in with them easily and got so comfortable that by mid-February, she was bringing Aaron, her boyfriend, along. Aaron wound up being history by April, that relationship going out and down in a shower of hellfire. Sure, she’d had friends at college outside of their small group, but it was the Friday night where they all went to a bar and snuck Lizzie vodka sodas while the boys pinned up a picture of Aaron to the dartboard and let her get it out of her system that Scarlett got the inkling their gossip circle extenuated beyond a casual and circumstantial friendship.

Robert, Mark, Hemsworth and Renner graduated in May. It should have marked the end of their friendship, but it wasn’t; Robert’s family had a timeshare in North Carolina and had been happy to let him take it off their hands that summer. He rounded up the seven of them once June struck and everyone’s lives evened out enough that there were no overwhelming amounts of guilt in falling off the grid for a few days.

Sunset Beach – not Miami or the California coast by any means, but wide open with its sandy beaches and lingering taste of freedom in the air, more prevalent than the salt from the ocean. They spent ten days in a beach house right on the ocean, Scarlett and Lizzie trying to tan only for the boys to foil every attempt, be it throwing them over their shoulders and then into the ocean or recruiting them for hour-long volleyball matches where they’d secretly scheme against their teammates. Ten days of hard lemonade and using beach towels as bedsheets and the infamous jellyfish incident was all it would take to move their status from friendship to family.

And they were.

Scarlett, Chris and Lizzie kept to the tradition of meeting up on Mondays and Wednesdays when classes resumed, but the gaping holes where the other four had sat around the table were felt in full. Chris began bringing a few friends of his around (Sebastian and Anthony, with enough personality to light the Eastern Seaboard), Lizzie inviting her lab partner on occasion (Karen, a redhead with a Scottish accent and proving the only person to successfully put Anthony in his place) and Scarlett eventually inviting her roommate (Cobie, because if everyone else got a plus one then she did, too). Sometimes if one of the newly-minted alumni had a free night, they’d swing by to laugh at everyone else’s problems before deeming them trivial in the face of their own life complications.

The year went on, the new additions feeling like they’d been there right from the start. And that summer, after Chris, Scarlett, Anthony and Cobie graduated, Robert promised to book another house on Sunset Beach in June as a graduation present. The eleven of them would go on and spend two and a half weeks on the North Carolina coast enjoying their summer and one another’s company, and it felt right. Scarlett hadn’t been able to explain it, but there was a magic on that beach that wove tightly into the threads of their friendship. It was the thing that made her believe their belonging together was etched up in the stars long before they’d stepped foot there and they winked at her every night when she looked up as reminder that this, these People-with-a-capital-P were all part of the greater plan.

(Plans make the most sense to her and make sense out of her life, so if these people’s roles in her life were penned by the universe, she figures she’s dumb not to take it and roll with it and hold it to her chest as tight as she can.)

Robert’s words towards the end of that trip still ring in Scarlett’s ears: as long as they were friends, they’d make the same trip together. Sunset Beach, June. Happiness.

And they did. Every year, the trips were longer and the houses were nicer. By the time Lizzie had a master’s degree, Robert’s salary was hefty enough that they could stay in a place with enough bedrooms to accommodate everyone – Anthony held a fierce grudge about his second summer’s sleeping on the couch and continued threatening Robert with his chiropractor bill – for a month.

They all kept in touch as best they could throughout the rest of the year, but it was never the same as it was when all under the same roof. Most of them didn’t live local anymore, people had work and were in long-term relationships and some of them even already had kids. Life was perhaps the greatest barrier that stood in the way of their friendship. Things like technology made it easier with the group chat or the occasional visit from Lizzie and Evans if they came near Scarlett for the weekend, but even if things got bad, they could rest assured: the month of June was theirs. Nothing, not work or responsibilities or midlife crises would keep that from them and each other.

“What’s your travel timetable look like?” Scarlett finds herself asking Lizzie as she clears out the contents of her swimwear drawer and drops them onto her bed.

“Uh,” Lizzie sighs, sign of her wracking her brain. “I think I fly into Myrtle Beach at four-thirty on the first? Did you wanna carpool or something?”

“Can’t. I’m landing at like, midnight, and I refuse to sleep in that airport.”

“Midnight?” Lizzie echoes in disbelief. “Why the fuck are you doing a red-eye to Sunset?”   

Right as Scarlett goes to answer, Lizzie pipes back up and responds with her in unison. “Cheapest flight.”

Lizzie begins laughing in her ear. “Jesus, Scar, you’re worse than Renner when it comes to money.”

“Sue me. Besides, if I didn’t fly out early, I’d have a client try to squeeze me in the morning before I left, and I refuse to write anything down for the month of June asides from tan lines.”

“I mean it, Scarlett. Leave. The planner. _At home_.”

“Yes, your Highness.”

“I’m excited to see you,” Lizzie says, the tone of her voice shifting. She sounds the way Scarlett feels – like a kid on Christmas Eve, eagerly anticipating what was to come in the next few hours of their life.

“I’m excited to see you, too, doodle.”

“Oh, and make sure you snag us the master bedroom if you’re gonna get there at dark-thirty. Otherwise, what’s the point?”

Scarlett’s not only the type to plan, but the type to follow plans right down to the letter. Maybe it makes her uptight or rigid or unwilling to let loose, but it keeps the chaos local and her head screwed on straight. Saying _fuck it_ and throwing to the wayside has to happen on occasion, and there were certainly instances in the past where she couldn’t get a grip on the reins and gain control, but it always makes her want to break out into hives if it happens. Trips like this didn’t have a set plan, but she’s got her expectations. Expectations, in her dictionary, are just slightly less-concrete plans.

She spends May thirty-first doing one last run-through with her assistants to make sure they’ve got everything taken care of while she’s away (she refuses to field a single phone call, even if the office is on fire), finishes the last minute carry-on packing and takes an Uber to the airport exactly three hours before her flight is set to depart from the gates. She lands in Charlotte around ten-thirty and Myrtle Beach at twelve.

Myrtle to Sunset is another solid hour, Scarlett fortunate to find herself one of only a handful in line for a rental car and striking out from the airport as the clock edges closer to one. She drives down 17 with all four windows down, letting fresh air into the car and the quiet trickle of the radio escaping from the speakers out into an otherwise dead night around her. The tiny clock on the car’s dash reflects the date: June first. Two little numbers that settle deep inside her bones and brings about a tiny, albeit tired smile along with the peace in her soul.

They haven’t rented a different house in nearly four years, so it’s the same game as it always is; Robert would call the owner the day before to let them know they were on their way, and the first person to the house got to pick up the awaiting keys at a lockbox at the owner’s office. By the time she makes the stop, puts a key in the house’s mailbox in case the next arrival occurs while she’s lost to sleep, and pulls her car into the driveway, she can hear the master bedroom on the third floor calling her name over the sound of waves breaking on the shore in the distance.

Everything inside is dark, empty, otherwise quiet – a true rarity. She’s never the first to the house, usually arriving somewhere in the middle since she and Lizzie prefer carpooling from the airport. Someone else was always first and made the house feel like the home she knows best by the time she got there. Soon enough, it’d be filled with the sounds of conversations and oldies rock, overflowing with Robert’s clothes that a closet would never contain, every light in the house on like they were Fort Knox.

She’s much too tired to make the house feel like that for everyone else, so she abandons her luggage in the living room and drags herself all the way up the stairs.

It can wait until morning.

Morning comes early, sunlight piercing through the tacky curtains at an unholy hour and impossible to avoid the blades of, even if she does sandwich her head in between two pillows and pull the comforter over them for good measure. It wasn’t the angels returning outside her window that shakes her truly awake, though. It’s the sound of someone milling around downstairs.

Even in the fog of sleep, Scarlett begins combing her brain for everyone else’s timeline in arriving. Lizzie’s not going to be there before six, Evans and Hemsworth are always expected to show up closer to June second than June first, and most everyone has a full day of travel awaiting them to get to Sunset.

 _Did I accidentally leave the door downstairs open last night?_ God, if it’s a racoon in their kitchen, she’s burning the place down and playing dumb when everyone else arrives.

She glances over at the nightstand, wincing – she should have pulled a Cobie and grabbed the butcher knife out of the block to sleep with, just in case of this exact situation occurring. The woman had method in her madness, after all.

Well, she never did anticipate to survive a home invasion horror movie, anyways.

Might as well go out in a blaze of glory.

Throwing the covers back, Scarlett grabs her phone from where she slept on it all night – explains the awkward pain in her lower back – and pre-dials 911 in case the moment of truth downstairs is less than desirable. She does her best to creep down the staircase on her tiptoes, praying the steps weren’t creaking as loud as they seemed to be in her own head.

Once the wall lowers and she’s completely exposed to the lower floors of the house, she cranes her neck out to get a look into the living room and her potential demise.

“Oh my _god_ ,” she yells out right as her heart saves itself from the free-fall in her stomach, slumping against the bannister in relief.

Jeremy Renner, all sprawled out on the couch as he flips through channels, looks up at her with a lazy smile on his face. “Morning.”

Face scrunching up in irritation, Scarlett hurls her phone off the bannister and down into the living room below without thinking twice. Jeremy brings his hands up and catches it in a neat cradle. “It’s good to see you too,” he continues, waving the phone around. “A whole year apart and this is the greeting I get?”

“You scared the _shit_ outta me!” she accuses.

He scoffs, holding both of his hands up in mock arrest. “Who did you think it was?”

“Anybody but you!”

“I take full offense – you of all people know I’m too cheap to get on a flight that arrives at a normal time of day.”

Scarlett rolls her eyes, peeling her body from the railing and taking the stairs two at a time all the way back down to the living room.

“Sorry I scared ‘ya, sweetheart,” Jeremy mumbles as he pulls himself off the couch and meet her halfway with open arms for a hug.

“Don’t do it again.”

“Summer’s young.”

Jeremy Renner is the kind of person whose very existence was contradictory and controversial. Everything that he does doesn’t make sense and could easily get him into trouble, but he’s able to make it all work and get away with it thanks to a winning smile.

When she’d first met him, it was easy to stare at him with little hearts in her eyes – he was beautiful, anybody with eyes could have seen as much – but it didn’t take long to figure out that he was not the kind of person who would happily reward her unraveling herself into some giggling, lovesick shell. His love life was a category five hurricane that he barricaded her out of almost immediately upon exchanging three words to each other that weren’t the week’s homework assignment. Instead, she got a best friend who would sit next to her in class and make her laugh so hard into her hand on a regular basis that she had to lie to a professor about having asthma.

The week and a half lifespan of Scarlett’s crush on Jeremy went long forgotten in comparison to all the life they’ve lived as friends. She wasn’t as close to him as she was Evans or Lizzie, but she still trusts him the way she trusts her own twin brother. He was the one to take her out to dinner when she’d landed a spot at her first big girl job post-graduation and she always sent him handwritten cards every year on his birthday with a bottle of whiskey. They’ve slept on the floor together in Hemsworth’s apartment during hell week at school and he was gentleman enough to give her his shirt to sleep in; he’d driven the getaway car when she needed to escape her own engagement party (and engagement itself); she’s played his girlfriend to get rid of the unwanted female attention more times than she could count just like she’s done for all the boys; they’ve incited karaoke sessions and learned how to bake a cake without using the mix from the box and dominated at Pictionary, and they’ve done it all of it together.

There are more memories that feature Jeremy than don’t.

Time, she’s noted, has always kind to Jeremy. At twenty-nine, he’s nowhere near as wild as he was in college – that, or he’s learned to tone it down better – and reminds Scarlett much more of a giant teddy bear now than ever before. The mischievous streak was still strong as ever but his edges weren’t as rough anymore. He’s got laugh lines around his eyes and speaks fondly of the old days with no desires to ever return to them and still gives the best hugs, as proven by the way she fits right into his arms.  

“Hey,” Jeremy says as they split apart from their hug, his blue eyes catching the midmorning sunlight from the windows and sparkling. “If anything, that’s payback for you leaving your luggage in the fuckin’ doorway. Nearly broke my neck this morning when I walked in.”

“Aw, poor Old Man Renner,” Scarlett teases. “What a sad story.”

Jeremy shoots her a glare as he fell back onto the couch. “It wouldn’t be poor Old Man Renner for long; I’d make _you_ pay the hospital bill.”

“Still sweet as ever, I see.”

“Well, of course.” Scarlett takes a seat next to him, perched on the edge of the couch cushion while Jeremy sprawls back out. “When did you get here, anyways? You’re never the first.”

Scarlett tilts her head in contemplation. “Two? Three, maybe? I didn’t bother looking at a clock when I came stumbling in.”

“And I guess it’s safe to assume you’ve already claimed the master.”

Scarlett grins – divvying up rooms was hard when they travelled en masse, but travelling from separate corners of the world made it easier. Whoever arrived first would get free choice of bedroom, no bitching allowed. To her, it typically made no where she slept, since she knew she’d wind up sharing a bed with Lizzie no matter the size of the room. “You’d be correct.”

“Ah, I suppose that’s better than Downey getting it for the third year in a row. I purposefully did a red-eye for that reason alone.”

“You’re committed, I’ll give you that.” It was more than commitment; Scarlett knows the strength of Jeremy’s resentment for flying. “You sleep any on the plane?”

“Thank god for Ambien,” Jeremy nods.

“Don’t suppose you’d know anything about the rest of the Brady Bunch,” Scarlett says, gesturing to the empty room around them.

Jeremy shrugs, picking the remote back up and flipping off of HGTV. “I’m sure you and Lizzie already co-conspired about your itineraries. Hemsworth is flying back from Spain so he’ll be here whenever he gets here; Robert and Ruffalo said later this afternoon, but you know how Spirit goes.”

“They flew Spirit?” Scarlett repeats dumbly.

“And they got the nerve to call _me_ the cheapskate of the group.”

“Is this some, like, social experiment to see how the other half lives?”

“Knowing Downey? Probably.” Jeremy’s channel surfing remains steady, barely letting an image flicker across the screen before he pushes the ‘up’ button in search of something to watch. “As far as everybody else, I’ve got no idea what the plan is. Frick and Frack are probably traveling cross-country in a clown car, and Cobie and Karen choose to distance themselves from us with very good reason. Hopefully they’ll get here soon enough. It’s supposed to start raining this afternoon.”

Scarlett bites back a groan. Checking the weather hadn’t been high priority; the main goal of yesterday was being on time for her earliness. Grabbing her phone off the coffee table where Jeremy had placed it, she opens up the weather app and lets it recalibrate her location.

Just as he’d said: rain in the afternoon, carrying over for the next few days. Not exactly how she wants to start the trip, nor would it be ideal for helping haul in Robert’s ridiculous amounts of luggage that he always insisted upon bringing with him.

“You wanting to hit the beach or something before the clouds roll in?” Jeremy asks, tearing away from his TV show hunt long enough to glance her way.

Scarlett shrugs half-heartedly as she tucks her phone underneath her leg. “Not really. That requires a lot of work that I don’t feel like doing.”

“Oh, what, putting on a bathing suit and walking down some stairs?”

“Laborious, I tell you.”

They’re too lazy to move beyond the couch and do anything truly productive, eventually nestling back into the cushions and melting the hours away with reruns of Law and Order: SVU. It’s mindless and for two people who haven’t seen each other in a year, very much unsociable, but it’s the recharge Scarlett needs in order to feel like a functional human being again. Four and a half episodes later, Scarlett begins to feel the inside of her stomach start to chew on itself.

“I don’t suppose you stopped by a grocery store on your way in this morning,” Scarlett mentions off-handedly when things snap to commercial.

Jeremy shakes his head. “Nope. And I’m sure the only things in the cabinets is a fine layer of dust.” His eyes flicker over to her. “You wanna go grab something at Zappy’s?”

Zappy’s was the nearby pizza restaurant that every summer, they got closer and closer to being banned for life. It was mostly Hemsworth’s fault, since he was the one that insisted upon bending the _no shoes no shirt no service_ rule every time they went in and having the slice-a-minute contest that always resulted in someone getting sick or wildly angry when the cheating accusations rolled through. “Works for me. We going in our pajamas?”

“It’s June first. I say we hold off on pushing our luck until at least the third.”

After brushing her teeth for close to five minutes and putting on something other than a tank top that was absolutely see-through now that she thinks about it, she meets Jeremy back downstairs in the kitchen. “My car or yours?” she asks, twirling the strap of her wallet around her fingers absentmindedly.

Jeremy grins. “Mine. This year’s is the best yet.”

Annual salary as a realtor meant Jeremy was able to shop out of the luxury section at Enterprise, reflecting the same pride he took in his cars. This year, it’s a little less luxury, Dodge Charger that turns the smile on Jeremy’s face mega-watt as he gestures grandly towards it. “Don’t you have a Charger at home?” Scarlett’s eyebrow lifts quizzically as she waits for the handle to give under her hand.

Jeremy’s face falls right as she hears the tell-tale click of the lock undoing. “Yeah, but this one is my _dream_.”

“I mean, if it floats your boat, Renner.”

He climbs in after her, pushing the keys into the ignition and a wave of Aerosmith hitting her in the face the second the car purrs to life. “Oh, it does, Johansson.”

Jeremy drives with all the windows down just like her, music much louder for the world to hear, and the sunshine on her skin feeling very much like being back at home.

At Zappy’s, they split a margherita pizza and a basket of garlic knots, Jeremy continually pushing the knots closer and closer to Scarlett every time that she loudly states she was done. “Stop encouraging me to ruin my bikini body,” she whines, relenting anyways and taking another.

Jeremy scoffs, the small smile still nudging on the corners of his lips. “Scarlett Ingrid, never in your life have you not had a bikini body.”

“The last eleven months of Wine Wednesdays beg to differ.”

“Shut up and eat the damn garlic knot.”

They talk about everything during lunch, because talking to Jeremy is easy. They talk about work, they talk about their love lives (or really, the lack thereof), the little funny things that happened and what TV shows they’re watching, how they feel about the political climate and what they hoped the future held for them. For Scarlett, Jeremy is the person that makes the words flow without second thought, because there’s never any sort of judgment. He seems to see her how he’s always seen her, and nothing could change that. It’s something she plans on, counts on even, and it keeps their friendship as one of the most honest things in Scarlett’s life.

After Zappy’s, a brief spell of responsibility rushes over them and they make the elective decision to swing through to the grocery store and pick up a few essentials until everyone else arrives and turns the Neighborhood Market into even more of a barren hellscape. It’s a pretty easy system: Jeremy pushes the cart while Scarlett throws things in the cart that align with the hastily thrown together list she’d written in the notes of her phone on the car ride over. Every aisle they turn down, the same woman with her fishing rod extending all the way out of the cart is there with no sense of direction that nearly results in someone getting impaled (“I’m two seconds away from throwing this cantaloupe at her head and going to jail for elderly abuse,” Jeremy vows).

The self-checkout line is made infinitely more complicated when Scarlett’s phone starts ringing. The caller ID picture is of Lizzie, taken a few years ago on their annual Sunset Beach trip where she’d spider-monkeyed her way up onto the roof with a forty ounce. Jeremy gives her a puzzled look as he hauls the bottled water back into the cart, Scarlett waving him off as she answers the call. “Liz?”

“Scarlett,” Lizzie interrupts her so loudly that she has to hold the phone away from her ear. She sounds strung out, voice a half-octave higher than normal as she yells. “I am on the verge of having an aneurysm and you need to talk me down before I wrap my car around a telephone pole.”

“Slow down,” Scarlett says carefully. “And don’t wrap your car around a telephone pole. Please.” That catches Jeremy’s attention, looking away from scanning the chips and furrowing his eyebrows together.

“Is it storming there?” Lizzie screeches.

“Not yet.” As far as she knows, it hadn’t started raining yet; during lunch the sunshine had all but evaporated as the clouds started to roll in, ugly and grey. “Why, is it storming in Myrtle or something?”

Lizzie’s voice cracks when she screams into the receiver again. “Yes! The roads are fucking closed, Scarlett!”

“Closed? What do you mean, closed?”

“What you mean _what do I mean closed?_ I landed nearly twenty minutes late, found Evans sitting in the Nacho Hippo and when we went to go get a rental car, the lady asked us where we were headed since the storm was already ‘effecting travel’ and stupid fucking North Carolina has already closed off the roads on the coast!”

Scarlett stands still for a moment, letting that sink into her skin. The roads are closed. There’s a storm rolling in that is so big that the roads are _closed_. Of all the things that Scarlett could have possibly planned on not happening, the roads closing due to weather sits pretty high on the list.

But, of course, control seems particularly in the mood to mock her after Walmart’s decision to be out of stock on Americone Dream, and the fact that it’s hurricane season is finally there to bite them in the ass. The roads are closed, which is the absolute last thing that she’d wanted to hear come out of Lizzie’s mouth, and it is as though Lizzie has taken a sledgehammer to the expectations of this trip.

“Take the backroads then,” Scarlett advises weakly, her brain mostly operating on autopilot.

Lizzie doesn’t sound like she was on the verge of flying through her windshield in a fit of anger anymore, just a heavy disappointment weighting her voice down. “We thought about it, but the lady said it’d be a bad idea. It just started hailing and we’re sitting under an awning at a gas station that may or may not flip over any second now; Chris doesn’t feel good about driving in this and neither do I. It’s not worth risking our lives.”

“So what are you saying?” Scarlett utters out stiffly. “You’re just gonna, what, sit at a gas station until it blows over?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. We rented a room at the closest hotel with a vacancy. Robert and Ruffalo’s layover got cancelled, Cobie said she, Karen, and Seb are all sitting in the airport waiting for things to calm down before they try to get a car and head over, and I’ve got no idea what Anthony and Hemi’s plans are. They’re probably still in the air, unaware of all this complete bullshit.”

Scarlett forces herself to take a deep breath, fist clenching around the bar of the shopping cart. She will not lose her cool in the goddamn self-checkout line at Walmart.

Times of crisis call for crisis plans. “What’s the plan?”

“We wait it out,” Lizzie sighs. “We’ll all stay here until they reopen the roads.”

It feels like falling, trying to make a rope materialize out of thin air. “Okay…okay, should we like, come to you?”

“Who’s we?”

Scarlett glances over at Jeremy nervously. “Me and Renner.”

“No. Hell no. Stay put. It’s headed your way, and the last thing I need right now is to be worrying about you and Renner trying to fight a storm like a bunch of stubborn fools.”

It’s dumb, the tears burning in the back of her throat all because something isn’t working out how she thought it would – it’s childish, _so_ fucking childish, and Scarlett commands herself to swallow her own irritation at the universe down before opening her mouth again. “Okay,” she complies, running a hand back through her hair. “Okay, yeah, we’ll stay here. But I want you to call me once you guys get back to your room. And every two hours with updates.”

“You got it. I want the same from you, too. You and Renner stay dry, okay?”

Scarlett finds herself nodding, even if Lizzie can’t see the gesture. “We will.”

“Scarlett,” Lizzie says gently, as if she knows the very thoughts that are currently running through her head like headless chickens. “It’s gonna be alright. We’ll be there in no time.”

“I know.”

“Breathe. Please.”

“I am.”

“I love you, S-Jo.”

“Love you too, doodle.” With that, Scarlett ends the call and shoves her phone into the back pocket of her shorts.

“What was that about?” Jeremy asks, eyes shifting up from the self-checkout monitor as his payment processes.

Her hand juts out as he moves to tuck his wallet away, grabbing at his wrist in a motion to stop. “Don’t put that away – we’ve got a make a second trip through this place.”

“For what?”

It physically pains her to send the next few little rain clouds of words rolling off her tongue. “Storm survival essentials.”

* * *

 

This, Scarlett was convinced, is punishment. She’d done as Lizzie asked (threatened) and left the J-Bible at home, and sure enough, the world took the opportunity and fucking fell out of orbit.

The storm had held off long enough for them to do another run through Walmart and get back home, a few spare raindrops falling on their heads as she and Jeremy hauled in their groceries. From there, it only took an hour for the wind and rain to pick up significantly.

She thought they’d officially left the days of it looking like midnight outside by six o’clock, but the storm clouds had made the sky so dark that the sheets of rain coming down were only visible when they turned the outdoor lights on the porch on.

It’s an empty night and an empty house, the emptiest that Scarlett has ever felt it. In a world where things were all going as they should have been (and where she had the J-Bible hidden in a fake bottom of her suitcase) the house would have been teeming with life at the very least, everyone making do with the rainy weather by starting up a round of Pictionary or voting on a movie to watch.

Instead it’s just her and Jeremy, floating around one another as if they’re total strangers. She’d come down with a headache after they’d unpacked everything in the kitchen and filled the bathtubs up with water just in case the worst happened, retiring upstairs for a nap. Jeremy hadn’t protested, just offered her Tylenol and promised to be a shout away if she needed anything.

She drifts awake after a few hours, the rain much more intense than previously as it beats down on the roof and the window panes. She eats a slice of leftover pizza for dinner before heading back to her room and nestling underneath the duvet once again.

 _Fuck this_ , she thinks bitterly as she tugged the blanket up to her nose. Fuck hurricane season. Fuck the airport for delaying flights. Fuck the North Carolinian governor or coast guard or whoever’s decision it was to close the roads. Fuck Lizzie for playing things safe. Fuck herself for not being the stubborn fool that Lizzie doesn’t want her to be.

This is her summer vacation, and even if she does have another twenty-nine days of it, this is not the foot she wanted to start off on. The first few days, after all, sets the tone for the entire trip. So far, it’s taking on the grey-colored glasses of pessimism.

She falls back asleep to the tune of her own self-inflicted misery, and wakes up to the sound of the smoke alarm.

First instinct tells her that lightning has finally struck – after all, bad luck is on their radar and what was stopping Mother Nature from kicking things up a notch? – and the house is, in fact, on fire. Scarlett shoots straight up in the bed, eyes adjusting to the darkness as she looks for something, anything that resembles smoke or flames. The room is pitch black, save for the screen of her phone that is now illuminating the room. She glances over at it through bleary eyes to see the notification that her phone has stopped charging.

If lightning had struck, all it did was knock the power out.

Still, she wants to make sure before she falls back asleep and dies a painful and ignorant death, so she finds her flip-flops near her bed and shuffles back downstairs with the light of her phone guiding the way.

The power knocking itself out had woken up Jeremy too, him already down in the kitchen waiting by the time it came into view. “Power’s out,” he informs her once he was sure she’d seen him.

“Anything on fire?” she asks, just to satiate her own curiosity.

In the light of her phone’s flashlight, Jeremy’s face draws up in a grimace. “No, you worst case scenario queen. No fire.”

Scarlett gives a short nod after taking a scan of the room. “Okay. That’s good.”

“Alright,” Jeremy says suddenly, sitting down at the kitchen table and patting the back of the chair that sits adjacent to his. “Take a knee, Johansson.”

Bewilderment covers her face, but she obliges anyways. “Everything I'm about to say to you is because I'm your friend, and friends care about their friends' wellbeing,” he begins, and already Scarlett knows what road they are preparing to venture down.

“But,” she prompts sleepily for him.

“But you let yourself get thrown out of whack way too fucking much by things that don’t even matter.”

“What could ever make you say that?” she drawls sarcastically, eyes cutting over at him as she props an elbow up on the table and rests her chin down on her balled-up fist.

“I get it, okay? This—” he gestures around the two of them “—is usually not what we have to deal with. You’re a creature of habit, and it drives you insane when things don’t go to plan.”

“You should have been a psychologist instead of a realtor.”

He offers her a wry smile. “Don’t try and get off-topic while I psychoanalyze you.”

Scarlett presses two fingers to her forehead in a mock salute. “Aye-aye.”

“So the thunderstorm from hell threw a wrench in our plans. So what? It could be a hell of a lot worse. We could be stuck in that tiny motel room with Liz, Evans, Cobie, Karen and Seb where they only have one bed.”

“Yeah, but at least we’d be together,” Scarlett mumbles underneath her breath.

“What am I? Chopped liver?” She lets her eyes drift up to his face slowly, because she knows he’ll be awaiting her with his patented _you know I’m right_ look. “We’re together. Doesn’t that count for something?”

She’s not sure she wants to give him the satisfaction of being right, even as his words start to take weight underneath her skin. Everything she does is planned out down to the minute and very rarely does it ever go off course – there’s always a backup plan waiting if things do go south. She doesn’t like having to relinquish control like this because a lack of control means things change, and she loathes change, the _true_ kind of change where someone unravels pieces of her life and switches up the way it gets woven together. It scares her, it makes her want to slam on the brakes and not leave her house and write up a dozen schedules so that things go her way.  

This trip is her safety net and her sanity in the moments where her clients make her want to jump off a ten-story balcony or the lingering remains of her personal life crumble apart. She doesn’t just look forward to it because it’s time off, she looks forward to it because it’s the time she gets to be with her authentic self when stress and the desire for control are removed from her character. And now that this storm has reared its ugly head, picking at what she’s known for so many years and relies on remaining steadfast, her desire for control evolves into a need she won’t see met.

It all blindsides her to the fact of what she has sitting in front of her. It always does, and she always hates herself for it when the moments come and go and she can look back on them in the regretful lenses of retrospect.  

“I guess,” she finally mutters half-heartedly. Because it does count for something. She’s with Jeremy. It’s not like she’s with her ex fiancé or a client from hell. It’s still June and still Sunset Beach, just with a little less company and a little more rain.

The edges of Jeremy’s mouth pick up in a smirk at her admittance of defeat. “You guess?” he teases, and she rolls her eyes in feigned annoyance.

“Fine. It does.” He takes the victory with the growing smile on his face that is beginning to reach up into his eyes. “I’m sorry you got stuck with me.”

“Sorry?” Jeremy repeats in disbelief, shaking his head. “Scar. C’mon. There’s no one else I’d rather be stuck with.”

“Don’t lie, we don’t need lightning to strike us again.”

His hand rests over her own, giving it a slight squeeze as his fingers curl over the surface. “I mean it,” he says sincerely, his blue eyes piercing through her like she’s made out of water.

One of Scarlett’s eyebrows lift with the remaining ounce of skepticism she just can’t seem to fucking shake. “Cross your heart?”    

“And hope to die.” The silence hangs over them for a moment while his conviction finds a home under her skin, and then – “Okay, maybe that wasn’t the most _appropriately_ timed thing to say, but…you know. You get what I mean.”

The muscles in her face relax as the sleepy smile sneaks its way onto her face. “Yeah. I do.”  



	2. knew it right then (when i looked in your eyes)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> why hello, it is me again! i am 98% recovered from the wild, wild weekend i had at amanda's ([clintasha](https://archiveofourown.org/users/clintasha) on here icyww) where they went to two wrong hotels trying to find me, i yelled at people i'd just met about clintasha, and we danced our little hearts out. the irony in all this was that while i was in MN, charlotte experienced some lovely hell thunderstorms, which i think was the universe's way of telling me that it noticed how i didn't work on this story in my free time and that it was gonna come for my neck!! but anywayz, thank you so so much for clicking here and reading and spending a lil part of your day with me. i've had THE most fun writing these last few months, i've been high on inspo and i just sksksksksks i have so many more story ideas that i'm itching to jump and write and I'M JUST REALLY REALLY HAPPY THAT PEOPLE ASIDE FROM ME AND AMANDA ARE HERE!!! 
> 
> also, you may have noticed a tense change. no, you didn't dream it. i was literally on the edge of ending it all and i had to do something to get these characters OUT OF THEIR HOLES IN MY HEAD. i was screaming at them "just because you are on vacation in this story DOES NOT MEAN YOU GET TO GO ON VACATION WE HAVE WORK TO DO YOU LAZY WHORES" and they just blinked at me so, yeah. leave me alone.
> 
> don't forget to leave a little love in the comment box on your way out, i'm a woman of the people and i can't give you what you want if you don't shout my way! chapter title is from the jonas brothers' "strangers" (gee what a shock, are we sensing a theme???). come bother me on twitter @emswifts or instagram @strrlights or if you really like hanging out in a graveyard, tumblr @nvtasha. happy reading xx

It’s still dark outside when Scarlett wakes up, so she makes the safe assumption that the storm has woken her up yet again in the middle of the night, rolls over, and succumbs back to sleep.

When she wakes up again some indistinct amount of time later, it’s still dark outside. She’s beginning to think in her state of disorient that she’s actually somewhere else – like Alaska, where they spend close to one hundred days in total darkness – until her surroundings slowly start to register in her brain and identify with a location. Sunset Beach. This dreary, miserable place is Sunset Beach.

And it’s almost one in the afternoon.

Scarlett trudges her way downstairs, the sound of rain pattering steadily on the roof and windowpanes much louder than the drone of music floating from somewhere in the house. She makes it over halfway down the staircase, stopping once the living room and kitchen are in view.

Still in his pajamas, Jeremy’s dancing around the kitchen with a knife and the jar of peanut butter in either hand, his music coming from the portable radio that normally keeps a permanent home in the garage whenever it wasn’t being dragged along out onto the beach. There’s a song embedded somewhere beneath the waves of static but from her stance, it’s completely inaudible. No matter, the sight in and of itself is amusing enough; Jeremy could have wonderful rhythm if he wanted to, but the whole two left feet misfortune put a real damper on his ability to strut around the kitchen like Michael Jackson.

She almost loathes to ruin such an entertaining moment, content to lean up against the bannister and watch on in silence. The static provides a perfect opportunity for his words from their earlier conversation to play in the far corners of her mind and crescendo: _we’re together, doesn’t that count for something? There’s no one else I’d rather be stuck with._

He’d made a point. She’s glad she’s not stuck with someone like Ruffalo who, albeit kind, resembles a senior citizen on a good day, or someone like Hemsworth, who would have woken her up at six thirty in the morning by putting ice cubes down her shirt. She’s stormed in with someone who prefers to dance around the kitchen barefoot while he makes himself lunch to the sound of static with the occasional note of a Bon Jovi song slipping through. And it had to count for something.

Besides, he’d crossed his heart and hoped to die, which, considering how they’re weathering a storm in hurricane season in a beach house, was a risky take. If it didn’t count for something, his life is as good as a zero sum.

“Eight-point-five,” she announces as he dances back up to the edge of the counter where his sandwich awaits his return. The sound of her voices startles him close to death; his hand loses grip on the knife as he practically throws it up in the air. He scrambles to catch it and does so just barely, Scarlett burying her giggle into the palm of her hand.

Jeremy spins around with the knife pointed accusatorily in her direction. “You,” he swears, his breathing heavy. “Scared the _shit_ outta me.”

She doesn’t bother trying to fight the grin from infecting her mouth and spreading over her face. “So that means we’re officially even for yesterday.”

His eyes narrow into slits. “And for that, you can fix your own damn lunch.”

Scarlett bounds down the remaining stairs, swinging around towards the kitchen by grip of her hand on the bannister. “Ah, yes, because I, a twenty-seven-year-old woman, do not know how to make a peanut butter sandwich.”

“Why an eight-point-five?” Jeremy questions, returning his attention back to the two pieces of bread he’s got laid out on the counter (but not without pouting, she notices). “Why not a ten?”

She shrugs. “Everyone’s got room to improve.”

“Even you?”

Scarlett waits until he looks up from the jar of peanut butter to shoot him a glare. “Even me.” She pauses, cocking her head to the side as she contemplates it. “Although I’d say I’m closer to the ten than you are.”

Jeremy just rolls his eyes. “Stay humble, Scar, don’t you ever change,” he mutters dryly.

She nudges the radio over on the counter slightly to make room for herself, hoisting herself up and sitting down next to it. Her legs dangle against the lower cabinet like a child’s, hands folded in her lap as she watches Jeremy finish his sandwich-making efforts. “So, would I be correct in assuming the power’s still out?”

Jeremy runs his tongue down the length of the knife to clean off the last remains of peanut butter, causing Scarlett to cringe. Only spending a month with him out of the year means she’s privy to regularly forgetting his tendencies of acting like a five-year-old raised by a pack of wolves. “Sure is. I don’t think it’s just us, either; seems like everybody on the street’s out. My guess is a line’s down. No one’s gonna be getting out to fix it in this weather.”

“Back to the prairie days we go,” she finishes, her lips pursing.

“Better conserve your phone battery. Once it’s gone, then you’re _really_ cut off and back in the 1800’s.”

If she has to guess, Jeremy’s phone is already dead and he couldn’t be happier about the fact. The whole ‘realtor-who-must-rely-on-phone-to-keep-in-business’ schtick runs irritation straight through to his bones and she knows how much it drives him up a wall. Getting in touch with him via phone call or text message or even through an email always proves complicated, since the phone remains in two states at all times: do not disturb, or dead. For him, this is likely a dream come true, best case scenario. No one’s calling him, no one’s trying to show him how to work Instagram (they’ve tried three years in a row now and he could only ever maintain it up until June since Lizzie and Karen post on his behalf, and from July on it would fall dead), and best of all, it’s the perfect excuse as to why he is completely out of reach. “Did you ever talk to the others?” he asks.

Scarlett nods. She and Lizzie have been sending each other sporadic updates throughout the night – mostly whenever she would wake up thanks to something the storm did and check her phone to see what time it was – last she checked, they still had power. Some number of miles away, Liz, Evans, Cobie, Seb, Karen, and Anthony are all crammed into a one-bedroom suite at some hotel that really was more of a motel with many floors. Scarlett considers it a miracle that there are no casualties yet in what she’s sure was a fight to the death for the singular mattress.

“They’re okay. Robert, Ruffalo, and Hemi are still out of range, but they’re probably better off where they are. At least they still have running water.”

“We have running water,” Jeremy corrects, putting the peanut butter back inside one of the overhead cabinets and picking his completed sandwich off the counter. “We’re just not using it in order to conserve.”

“Is that your buzz word for the day?” she quips. “Conserve?”

“It might be.” He takes a bite of his sandwich, back leaning up against the counter close to where she’s sitting. “What’s on your agenda for the day?”

She thinks about it for a moment, only to come up with a shortage of an answer. One of her shoulders bends in a shrug. “Dunno. I’ll probably get ready and make lunch first. Figure out the rest as I go.” The thought is uncertain in her mind and sounds just as unstable when it rolls off her tongue. She doesn’t _do_ the whole flying by the seat of her pants thing. She likes routine, and if she can’t have a routine, then she all but needs someone to point their finger in a direction and tell her what to do with her time.

Unfortunately for her, the only person who finds real joy in doing that is miles away in a tiny motel-hotel.

Jeremy nods. “Sounds like a good enough plan.”

“Only plan I’ve got.”

They stay where they are for a moment, silence encompassing them as Scarlett absently kicks her legs back and forth and Jeremy continues to eat his sandwich. “Well, guess I better get to it,” she says when she officially reaches the threshold of feeling like she’s overstayed her welcome in his presence.

She hops off the counter, careful not to kick him in the arm in the process. Two steps into her retreat back to the bedroom, Jeremy makes a strangled sort of noise mid-chew and catches her attention. She stops, spinning back around to watch him pace over to the kitchen table where he’s turned their forty-pack of bottled water into the centerpiece. “Here,” he instructs, pulling out a bottle and using the hand that isn’t holding a sandwich to toss it at her. “Use this when you brush your teeth so we can c—”

“I will _pay_ you to go the rest of the day without saying the word ‘conserve.’”

His face melts into a goofy grin, cheeks puffed out like a chipmunk around a bite of peanut butter and loaf bread. “You’re on, Scar.”

She holds the water bottle up for emphasis as she says somewhat dumbly, “Thanks,” leaving him and his lunch and that static-y radio in her dust.

She’s got nothing else to do with herself, so Scarlett takes her time in getting ready for the day (despite having slept over half of it away already). She brushes her teeth with the bottle of water and makes the executive decision to do a full face of makeup for the hell of it. Scarlett’s not used to taking her time on anything, really – there’s always something to do, somewhere to be, someone to say hello. Every minute of her own time is typically consumed by something someone has set up for her, be it herself or an outside force, and it’s grown to be not only her norm, but conditions in which she thrives. Now she’s just got an overabundance of time where she’s sitting and standing around with no real aim or end goal, and it's making her skin crawl.

She winds up using over half of the water bottle to rinse her brushes off and wipe her eyes clean of the first attempted look – who the fuck was she kidding, putting on a smoky eye? – before putting something a little more neutral in its place. She finishes her makeup and briefly contemplates her own sanity for a moment, wondering what the world’s come to if she’s really one spending her time doing her makeup to ultimately sit around the house and doing a whole lot of nothing, before collecting herself and rummaging to the bottom of her suitcase for something other than pajamas to wear.

She twists her arms uncomfortably behind her head to French braid her hair off her face, slipping into a pair of cotton shorts and a t-shirt she’s ninety percent sure belongs to Lizzie. Before she leaves her room, she spots the book she’s packed shoved to a far corner of her suitcase and decides to take it along with her. If she can’t further her tan, she can at least further her mind.

Jeremy’s nowhere to be found when she returns back to the kitchen, leaving her to her own devices for lunch. There’s no more of their leftover Zappy’s – they’d been smart not to buy much that required refrigeration and everything they did buy that absolutely needed to stay cold was currently sitting in a cooler. The pizza wouldn’t have lasted much longer and it seems Jeremy finished off the remainder of it with that very knowledge in mind. She decides to copy him, pulling out a knife from the drawer and making herself a peanut butter and strawberry-jelly sandwich. The jelly isn’t all that great at room temperature, but it’s decent enough, and for dessert she digs into Jeremy’s box of Little Debbie cakes and sneaks one for herself.

Off of the living room is a screened in porch, the amenity so beloved by Lizzie that it was worthy of hurtling threats Rob’s way over the years when it came to booking their house for the summer (“It better have a screened in porch, or else I’ll make you and the boys spend the summer building one onto whatever lesser-than home you book. I don’t care if the homeowners don’t want it.”) The homeowners kept a dining setup out there with a small sitting area off to the side, all frequently used throughout the group’s stays. It wasn’t uncommon for them to spend hours of their summer together out on that porch.

Scarlett figures if she can’t go out on the beach and read (without being susceptible to ink running down the pages and blowing away altogether), she’ll take the next closest thing: reading on the porch.

The wind occasionally blows in a slight mist through the screen, not enough to scare Scarlett off or grate her nerves too severely. Mist from the rain felt oddly similar to ocean spray from one of the boys running past her or a wave breaking too forcefully in her beach chair – it brings about a familiarity that she’s craving for the taste of on her tongue. Plus, sitting in the thick of a thunderstorm tends to turn the loud thoughts in her brain down to a dull hum.

She spreads out across the entire length of the couch, her legs crossed at the ankles and propped up on the other spare throw pillow that isn’t needed in supporting her head. She thanks every lucky star she has that this was the year she decided to bring along _The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo_ as her beach read and not something like _Lady Be Good_ that the year before, she’d cleared through in under two hours. Usually, she and the girls all bring books and trade out whenever they each finished one – she’ll have her hands outstretched for new material by the time they all pull up into the driveway at the rate she’s going.

The hours melt away with the sound of the storm colliding against the ocean and every turn of her page. She hardly notices a change in time (the sky’s still just as dark as it was when she’d woken up this morning) until the familiar creak of the door jerks her out of whatever trance she’s fallen in.

Jeremy peers past his fingers that are wrapped around the edge of the door, smiling at her when she drops the book down to her chin to meet his sights. “What page you on?”

Scarlett takes a quick glance back into the book. “Two hundred eighty-three.”

He straightens up, crossing over the threshold and letting the springs pull the door to a close behind him. “Don’t let me take you away from it,” he insists as he approaches the edge of the porch to look out at the ocean through the screens, hands settling over his hips. “Just wanted to see what it was doing.”

She nods, picking her book back up and lifting it to eye-level. His words are like catnip, though – she cannot resist the urge to the exact opposite of what he’s suggested. She gets hung up on the same sentence, reading through it at least sixteen times due to her mind constantly detouring back to Jeremy.

He catches her somewhere after the seventeenth, just-as-failed-as-the-ones-before attempt to read her sentence. “You don’t mind sitting out here and getting wet?” He gestures down to his t-shirt, already splattered with the stray raindrops that slipped through the holes in the screen and found a home in the fabric.

“Doesn’t bother me. We’re at the beach, Renner. Getting wet comes with the territory.”

“Touché.”

Instead of going back indoors like she fully anticipates him to, he makes his way down the length of the porch and takes a seat on the loveseat adjacent to her couch. Scarlett’s eyebrows wrinkle, the pillow behind her head rustling as she cranes her neck to get a better scope of him.

He shoots back an equally puzzled look. “What?”

“Nothing,” she says almost a little too quickly. It’s not nothing, but she can’t place it and assign a name to it. So she lets it go, returning back to her book and taking only the small glance she gets of Jeremy’s half-smile with her.

She finally makes it past her hang-up sentence (it still makes no sense to her) but the weight of Jeremy’s presence continues to press into the back of her shoulders. She doesn’t get it: what’s he doing? What’s the motive, the point to it?

The words slowly reveal themselves from between the lines of the book in the tone of Jeremy’s voice: _we’re together, doesn’t that count for something? There’s no one else I’d rather be stuck with._ Somewhere in her brain, the part of her conscious that sounds terrifyingly like Lizzie demands she get over herself and stop being so anal about every-fucking-thing.

It’s June. She’s supposed to be feeling like herself already, not some statue that can’t swat away the hornet buzzing under her skin. Plus, it’s _Jeremy_ of all people. The man once spent his Friday morning holding her hair back as she threw up after one particularly ugly Tequila Thursday.

Scarlett forces herself to take a deep breath and truly let it go, nestling deeper into the couch cushions and losing touch with reality to fall in the pages of her book.

She disappears inside the story, hardly noticing the comfort of coexisting she slips into as the words race her by and time melts once again. She doesn’t come back up for air until somewhere just past the four-hundred-page mark when she hears the faint sounds of snoring from the loveseat next to her.

Closing the book, Scarlett pulls herself upright. Sure enough, Jeremy’s lost to the world, hands folded on top of his chest and his legs dangling over and off the arm of the loveseat while he sleeps. To her, it doesn’t look comfortable in the slightest. But comfort’s relative to people like Jeremy, who can make themselves at home anywhere you drop them. He seems enough at peace, his face subtracting five years when free of the laugh lines he’s already got deepening further into his skin.

She’s overcome with the strangest urge to run her fingers through the mess of hair on top of his head. Fortunately, his brain was syncopated enough with hers to realize the shift in thought – shifting so far that she may as well be veering wildly off the road and into the grass – and it shakes him awake. “Don’t let me take you from it,” she jokes softly in reference to his nap as his blue eyes cut up at her, the lazy smile returning to his lips upon sight.

“Nah,” he slurs, arms lifting over his head as he arches his back so far that she hears a few of the vertebrae crack in relief. “Won’t sleep tonight.” Jeremy glances down at his wrist. “’Sides, it’s already five-thirty.”

“Storm seems like it’s settling out a bit,” Scarlett observes nonchalantly.

“That, or we’re just in the eye.”

She can’t fight the instinct to roll her eyes. “And you say I’m the pessimist.”

Jeremy lifts both his hands in his exaggerated shrug, breaking out into a sheepish grin. “Somebody’s gotta be.”

“What are you thinking for dinner?”

Jeremy adjusts himself on the loveseat so his head is facing her, providing him easy access to shoot her a look. “Scarlett. It’s five thirty. People who eat dinner at five-thirty also qualify for the senior citizen discount.”

“Well, if we’re gonna have to cook dinner over the flame of an open candle…”

She awaits a quick-witted reply in response that never arrives. Instead, Jeremy gets that faraway look in his eye that says the cogs are turning inside his head and an idea is being born right in front of her. Her forehead crinkles as her eyebrow scrunches towards the middle. “What?” she asks.

“You trust me?” he counters, causing her face to fall into a deadpan expression.

“C’mon.”

Jeremy then swings his legs around to plant both feet on the ground, standing up and extending his hand out to her. “We’re officially making the most out of this situation.”

“I thought that’s what we’ve been doing,” she protests innocently as she tucks her book underneath her arm, taking his hand.

“Yes, but now we’re going to have fun with it.”

Scarlett wants to ask him where he’s taking this, but the look on his face screams she’s not getting anything more out of him even if she bats her eyelashes a few extra times and cranks up the Johansson charm to maximum amplitude. He’s always been one for the dramatics.

Back inside the house, she finds herself suddenly aware of the dampness in her clothing that sitting out in a storm has brought on. It’s nothing that the air conditioning wouldn’t be able to fix, but the air conditioning requires power, which they currently have none of. For Jeremy, the same issue comes no big deal; he sheds his t-shirt right by the door and crumples it into a ball, throwing it off onto the couch.

His newfound shirtless-ness is _also_ something Scarlett finds herself aware of. Perhaps too aware. She’s seen him shirtless many times before, and every time, it’s impossible not to admire the way the muscles in his back and shoulders ripple as he throws the shirt for at least three seconds before her brain returns.

So what if she finds it attractive? She’s a hotblooded human being with eyes (and needs), for Christ’s sake. She can’t be blamed – if anything, she’ll just do as she always does, blame the heat and tuck it back to bed.

It takes her a moment to realize he’s halfway down a path on his train of thought, talking to her without realizing she’s not tuned in the way he thinks she is. “…and I think getting some of that stuff out of the cooler sooner rather than later will make sure we get our bang for our buck, don’t you think?” When he doesn’t get an answer, he catches her eyes and lifts his eyebrows in question. “Really? No comment about how I’m cheap?”

The blank look on her face gives her away. His shoulders drop. “You didn’t hear a single word I said, did you?”

Scarlett feels the blush creep into her cheeks and knows there is no hope of trying to correct his entirely accurate assumption. He just smiles at her, rolling his eyes good-naturedly. “Go upstairs and change, you loser,” he tells her. “I’ll just surprise you.”

“I don’t like surprises,” she warns him, coupled with an index finger held up in pause.

“You said you trusted me.”

“Don’t make me regret it.”  

He dismisses her with the wave of his hand.

She puts on dry clothes, throwing the damp ones over the shower railing. The detour provides her with an opportunity to check her messages; she sits on her bed and waits for her phone to turn back on and connect to the fragments of a cellular network somewhere. A few messages from Lizzie trickle in with the day’s updates.

 

**elizabeth olsen (lizzerdoodle)** **🍪💛**

Anthony has already threatened all of us   
that he will go home at prospect of sleeping  
in the floor yet again

Please make sure you call Sebastian “Sebbo  
the Starfish” when you see him. It’s necessary

Realized I never sent you the full recap of this  
morning so while I sit in the bathroom floor   
hiding from the morons that have given me a  
headache, I shall do just that

We all decided we were gonna sleep in the same  
bed last night because it was a king but it went   
poorly. Very poorly. Karen n Cobie wound up in the  
floor at some point and are complaining of   
chiropractic issues now. Don’t think I ever truly   
went to sleep last night, but wasn’t like it mattered   
much because CHRISTOPHER woke me up at five   
fucking am – will be drowning him for this l8r. The   
longer we sit in this godforsaken room the crazier   
we all get. Anthony and Seb tried braving the storm   
for lunch earlier, went horribly. Chris keeps making up  
games for us to play while we wait and none of them  
make sense, all they do is get on my nerves. I just   
want to watch Judge Judy in PEACE

I miss you.

I need to see you ASAP before I go to jail for murder

I hope you and Renner aren’t, like, halfway under  
the sea or anything.

Did Renner shave that godawful beard of his? Cuz if  
not that is first on the prank-genda

We’re gonna be here another night. I will need for   
you to find some driftwood, fashion a headstone   
and carve into it “here lies chris evans, an actual   
fucking dumbass”

I MISS YOU

Okay either you’re getting laid, your phone has been  
swept away by flood waters, you’re dead in your room  
or you checked too many emails and let your phone   
die, I need u to specify which

No one is dead. No one is getting dicked down.  
Get your mind out of the gutter, you heathen.  
Just been trying kill the time since power’s  
still out.

Go watch Judge Judy for me. TAKE   
ADVANTAGE OF THE ELECTRICITY

Also, can confirm Renner has shaved.

THANK GOD

Not that you’re alive, but that he shaved

One less casualty I’ll have to engineer

 

Her lips break into a small smile as she turns her phone back off, discarding it back on the nightstand. She misses Lizzie, misses the rest of the cohort of idiots, but there’s a tiny piece of her that’s oddly grateful she’s not trapped in a tiny room with the rest of them. She’s actually glad that she’s here and not there. Lizzie’s good at lots of things, and accurately conveying her emotions through strongly worded text messages is one of them. It will be a miracle if she gets here with all of her hair on her head and not clutched in her fists.

When she comes back downstairs, Jeremy’s waiting for her at the foot of the stairs (still shirtless). “Turn around,” he instructs as she comes to a screeching halt a few steps above where he’s standing. “Go upstairs in one of the guest bedrooms and strip the bed.”

“Strip the bed?” she repeats incredulously.

Jeremy gives a succinct nod. “’Ya heard me. Bring down the comforter and the pillows.”

She’s confused by it, but she does what he asks – even if it was more of a statement – and strips the guest bedroom on the second floor. The comforter drags behind her on the floor like it’s the train of a wedding dress as she hauls it over her shoulder and back out onto the staircase.

“What do you want me to do with this?” she calls out from the landing, leaning over the railing.

From wherever he’s disappeared off to, Jeremy yells, “Just throw it!”

“Throw it?”

“Yes! Put that single season of high school softball to use. Throw it.”

She regrets the day she let them look through her yearbooks – they will never let her short-lived career in athletics go, even if that is all she wants to do with it. “What if I break something?”

“I have an unhealthy amount of faith in your aim!”

She scowls even if he can’t see it, draping the blanket all the way over the railing and sliding it down so gravity pulls it down onto the floor beneath it in a crumpled pile.

Retreating back to the bedroom, she fetches as many of the pillows as she can carry in both arms and carries them back out to the landing. One by one she throws them over the railing with a little more gusto, watching them as they land in various places around the living room.  

By the time she’s on the last pillow, Jeremy’s strolling out of the kitchen with something in his hands. “Duck!” she yells down at him playfully, pretending to aim for his head.

He swerves out of the way as the pillow bounces down onto the couch behind him. “Decapitating the man who’s feeding you dinner is a mean way to say thank you,” he chides.

“Dinner seems to be a relative term,” she sings, skipping down the stairs and taking them two at a time. “To some, a box of Ritz crackers is a snack.”

He glares at her, throwing the box down onto the couch. “Get over here and help me move this coffee table.”

“Can’t do it yourself?” she teases, obliging anyways and walking around to the opposite side of the coffee table.

“Help me before I hide all the food and leave you to starve.”

She picks up one end of the table on his count, Jeremy walking backwards and weaving through the rather tight space so they can put the table behind the couch. They lower it down onto the ground – Scarlett’s extra mindful not to just let the table fall from her grip, last thing she needs is to knock a hole in the floor – and Jeremy begins looking around once his hands are free.

“Since you strike me as the one with a better eye for décor and all that shit, you wanna spread out the blanket?” he asks, scratching at the back of his neck.

That’s when she clues in. “Are we making this into a picnic?”

The blush that begins to creep into the apples of his cheeks is something that Scarlett’s never seen before, and she’s seen a lot of things that pertain to Jeremy Renner. “I figured it’d be fun,” he says sheepishly.

It hits her quickly, his body language and what it all spells out. He thinks that she’s going to frown on it, that she’s not going to like it. She’s never seen him seek for approval like this, not out of her, and she instantly feels the pit of her stomach dropping in her abdomen. “Yeah, it should be. Will be. I love it,” she says with every ounce of conviction she can muster into her voice, because she kind of does. He’s been more than good with her, forcing her to get a grip and letting her have her space and trying to make this as fun for her as possible because he _knows_ her and how she gets; she loves the idea and she loves the fact he’s still putting her first somehow in all this. She’ll be damned if she lets him think she doesn’t appreciate it.

“Yeah?”

Scarlett smiles genuinely, nodding. “Turns out you’ve still got a fresh idea or two up there in that brain of yours,” she says mischievously, her voice buoyant with every physical millimeter she sees him relax. “One beyond superb picnic setting, coming up.”

And if she reaches out and pats him square on the chest in reassurance before bounding off to retrieve the comforter in the floor? Well, he doesn’t have to know that it was as much for her as it was for him.

She’s good at this – setup, decorating, arranging, perfection. Jeremy’s right, she does have a better eye when it comes to things like décor. She spreads the comforter out in the floor a few feet away from the couch, framing it with pillows in their strategical clusters. In the dying moments of what little light they’ve got remaining to them, she scrummages for a grill lighter and some candles. Her hand is steady as she places and lights each candle that she’s got in the floor around the blanket, lining the TV stand, and in the little server tray she’s stolen off the coffee table that’s usually used as a centerpiece to hold magazines.  

She steps back once she’s finished, hands on her hips as she assesses her work. It’s good, damn good if she gives herself the credit she knows she deserves.

Scarlett just hopes that it brings a tiny smile to Jeremy’s face in the same way that he’s been trying to pull one from her with a pair of pliers.

He finally comes back into the room holding a giant platter that she’s got no idea how he’s acquired (he is also wearing a shirt once again), stopping short in the doorway of the dining room. She smiles hopefully, holding her hands out in a wide gesture. “Ta-da!”

She waits for what feels like the most painstaking thirty seconds of her life to see the muscles in his face relax. “Knew I could count on you.”

“Well, of course.” She lets her hands drop from her hips before adding, “Careful – there’s candles in the floor. Don’t want to set the house on fire.”

Jeremy shoots her a look. “Ye of little faith.”

He maneuvers around the room, pointedly careful not to encounter one of her candles in his path. He stops at the edge of the blanket, passing the tray off to her. Scarlett accepts it, bending down to sit it in the middle of the blanket while Jeremy disappears back into the kitchen.

She settles down on the blanket in her wait, pulling two of the pillows she’s arranged closer to her spine to support her back. Jeremy reemerges with two solo cups pinched between his fingers in an impressive display of balance – or just a big middle finger to gravity, she’s not sure which – and the entire bag of sour cream and onion Ruffles tucked under his arm.

He holds both of the cups out to her as he approaches, Scarlett reaching up and taking them so he can sit down without worrying about spilling their drinks all over someone’s bedspread or lighting the house on fire.

“Wanna explain this evening’s menu, Chef Renner?” she asks as he pulls one of the throw pillows she’s yanked off the couch and situates it under his elbow, laying down so his legs are stretched out along the length of the comforter.

“Gladly, doll.” He uses the hand that isn’t propping his head up to point onto the tray while naming everything he’s got spread out on it. “That’s hummus, that’s chicken salad…don’t know where the fuckin’ Ritz went—”

“Behind your head,” she answers for him. He bends his neck back and sees them laying on the couch.

“Oh, yeah. Forgot I put those there.” Scarlett rolls her eyes and leans back in the direction of the couch, fingertips just barely brushing the surface of the box and pulling it closer to her. “Anyways, so there’s that. Sliced up some of that cheddar…grapes, your nasty ass pickles, this random box of trail mix that you made me spend nearly five dollars on—”

“—the dried cranberries are worth it—”

“—it’s trail mix, Scar. It should not cost five dollars.” He shoots her a pointed look, and she just shakes her head. One of these days, she’ll make him learn that some things have an expensive price tag on them with good reason. “And then I’ve got chips,” he says, holding up the entire bag for emphasis as he sets it down near his platter. “And for dessert, my personal favorite...”

She watches as he bends forward, grabbing something off the platter and waving it in the air. The action is coupled with a ridiculously goofy grin etching deeper into his lips. “A true delicacy, they call them _Zebra Cakes_.”

“Sounds exotic,” she comments, voice dripping in sarcasm.

“You’ll enjoy it so much that you just might sneak another later and think I won’t notice.”

Oh, well. She’s got no regrets about the stolen one from lunch and she won’t have any regrets about the ones she steals later.

She glances down into the solo cup, met with neon yellow liquid sloshing around without any ice as buffer. “You opened that Mountain Dew?”

“I told you when you weren’t listening to me that we were getting as much stuff outta that cooler as we could. My money will _not_ go to waste.”

Scarlett holds out her cup towards him. “To your cheapness inspiring an actually good idea.”

When he smiles at her, she finds herself able to feel the edges of the warmth it radiates wrapping around her ribs and stomach. “Cheers, darlin’.”

Their cups collide together. His eyes never leave her as he brings his own cup back up to his lips, that warmth in her chest starting to curl outwards towards her limbs. She’s thankful that her drink is cold when it slides down her throat and hopes it’ll keep the warmth under control. She’s not known for much, but one of the things she considers herself infamous for is letting the little sparks turn her otherwise barren wasteland into a razing inferno. The last thing she wants is to swallow Jeremy in that.

She feels herself start to unwind the longer they sit there, both mentally and physically – by the time he opens up the plastic holding the Zebra Cakes nearly an hour and a half later, she’s sprawled out just like he is with her elbow keeping her head propped up. He tells her a long story about a client he’s had to deal with in the last eleven months that has somehow unraveled into a saga only Jeremy Renner could attract, and in return she offers up every horror story she’s dealt with in the last eleven months to make him feel better. It doesn’t compare, but she’s got a lot more of them than he does.

“What do you think the others are up to?” he asks as he tears off a bite of his Zebra Cake and offers it out to her. She’s inhaled hers, and she’s pretty sure she’s within the throes of a food coma at this point that would prevent her from getting up and getting another for herself.

“Oh, god,” she groans. “Liz said that it was getting closer and closer to a death match last time I checked my phone. Apparently Seb and Anthony braved the storm to go get lunch.”

Jeremy stares back at her in horror. “Seb and Anthony can barely drive a car in good weather.”

Scarlett shrugs. “Well, Liz said it didn’t go very well, so…”

Jeremy holds both of his arms out in a grand gesture as he theorizes. “Picture it: your last hope is Sebastian Stan—”

“—oh, we’re supposed to call him Sebbo the Starfish whenever they get here,” she interrupts. She shrugs when she gets a quizzical look back. “Don’t know what that’s about, but, anyways. As you were.”

“Okay, so picture it: your last hope is _Sebbo the Starfish_ and Anthony Mackie. They’re what stands between you and starvation. You send them out to pick up a pizza or some shit in the middle of a tropical storm.”

“They drive around the parking lot for fifteen minutes in a circle thinking they’ve actually gone somewhere,” Scarlett chimes in.

He nods in agreement, eyes fixed up towards the ceiling while his mouth verbalizes what she assumes is his train of thought. “They only realize they’re trapped in the parking lot when they get a phone call from the restaurant asking if they’re gonna be there to pick up the order any time soon.”

“They both argue about who’s going to drive the car even though one of them is already sitting in the driver’s seat.”

“Your bet?”

She pauses to think about it, lips pursed as she stares out the windows. It’s now bordering on pitch black outside thanks to the storm, the candles their only light in the room and the shadows of the two of them flickering along the wall in front of them. “Probably Mackie,” she answers. “He has a complex about driving.”

“My money’s on Sebbo. Romanian and everything.”

“Anthony’s faster.”

“Stan’s got the puppy dog eyes.”

“Anthony’s immune to them.” Jeremy gives her that one, tipping his cup in her direction before throwing it back and draining the last of his drink. “He probably pushed Sebastian into a piece of furniture or a potted plant in order to beat him in getting behind the wheel.”

“Now that, you’re probably right about.” He throws his empty cup down on top of the platter, where they’ve successfully cleared most everything off that Jeremy spread out for them. She’d give it to him – though she wouldn’t rate it a five-star meal, the picnic experience makes up for all the places the palate lacked. “They take an hour to pick up dinner, come back like drowned rats.”

“And they open the door to see that Chris and Lizzie have started Saturday Fight Night, all because Chris wouldn’t let Liz watch her soaps in peace.”

“The mattress? Torn to shreds.”

“That mattress is currently in fucking _pieces_.”

“Do we think Anthony’s mentioned the chiropractor?”

Scarlett just scoffs. “The better question is how many times do you think he mentions it over the span of an hour?”

“Over a hundred, easy. He holds a grudge.”

“Liz also said that Chris kept making up games for them to play to pass the time.”

Jeremy barks out a laugh around the last bite of his Zebra Cake. “That boy needs to get a job as a fucking camp counselor, put those talents of his to use where they’re appreciated, not writing his death sentence.”

“He would work great around kids.”

“Surprised he didn’t major in elementary education. He would have been _perfect._ Bright colors, lots of hands-on activity, surrounded by people at his intellectual level all day…”

“Too much responsibility,” she dismisses with the wave of her hand. “The third graders would eat him alive.”

“And Liz isn’t?”

“Oh, Liz is absolutely gonna have him hog tied in the back of her car when she gets here. I’ve already been instructed to fashion a headstone out of driftwood upon their arrival.”

“We’ve got some fuck-crazy friends,” Jeremy notes.

“Yeah, but we’re kinda stuck with ‘em.” She pauses for a moment, before adding, “And we love ‘em. They’re our fuck-crazy friends and nobody else’s.”

She doesn’t say it, but she thinks to herself, _you’re one of those fuck-crazy friends, and out of all of them, I’m glad that I’m here with_ you _. I’m glad to be stuck with you and nobody else, even if this doesn’t feel like being stuck at all. Not even in the slightest._

Jeremy splits through the silence she hasn’t even fully realized they’ve settled into. “You know…” He turns to look at her, and she lifts both eyebrows as prompt for him to continue. “I think in the spirit of Chris Evans, we oughta play a little game.”

Scarlett points an accusatory finger at him as she lifts her solo cup back to her mouth. “I am not playing one of those games where we summon a demon. Hard no.”

Jeremy’s face falls into a deadpan. “Okay, I take offense. Only Hemsworth would suggest some stupid ass shit like that.”  

She’ll give him that one. “No,” he carries on. “No demons. But it does involve the dark.”

Her eyes narrow. “What?”

The way he smiles ought to explicitly tell her that whatever’s up his sleeve is probably not a good idea before his lips ever do. “How do you feel about a little hide and seek?”

Scarlett stares back at him blankly. “In this giant, empty house, in the dark. Just us.”

“Well, if there are demons, they’re welcome to play too.”

“Stop mentioning the fuckin’ demons!” she whines. She came close to sacrificing Cobie for the greater good that time they accidentally had some malevolent spirit vacation in their dorm room junior year and she’s still not fully recovered. She won’t hesitate to throw Jeremy under a bus, be it spiritual or literal. “Are you serious?”

He opens his hands palm-up in a gesture that resembles a shrug. “As a heart attack.”

She weighs the option for a minute, thinking it over. The only real danger she’s in is potentially falling down the stairs in the dark. What else does she have to do with her time?

Besides, there’s a tiny part of her conscious that is screaming at her to say yes to whatever it is that he’s got up his sleeve if it means she gets to spend time with him, especially time where he’s got that dopey smile on his face and directed at her. If she disappoints that little voice, she gets the nagging feeling it will make her life hell in return.

“I get to hide first,” she says.

“Whatever you want.”

“Do I get a head start or are you just gonna watch me walk off and hide? ‘Cause those aren’t the rules to hide and seek. Unless, of course, we’re playing by Chris Evans’s rules.”

Jeremy rolls his eyes. “It’ll take me about two minutes to get my ass off of the floor and throw our stuff away. Think that gives you enough time to hide?”

She breaks out into a smile. “Plenty.”

“See you in two minutes,” he teases her.

“I’m like fuckin’ Houdini,” she promises. “You’ll never see me again.”

Jeremy blows her a kiss as she pulls herself to her feet. “Two minutes!”

She responds to his comment with a single, manicured middle finger.

Her hiding spot is already picked out by the time she takes two steps in the direction of the living room’s exit, but she decides to mess with him a little and throw a red herring his way by walking upstairs. She pauses on the part of the landing that’s out of his view, waiting for him to disappear from the living room and into a part of the kitchen that’s blocked by the wall before she creeps back downstairs and slips off in direction of the garage.

The beauty of the electricity being out means that she doesn’t stand the chance of accidentally dying in what she thinks is truly the best hide and seek spot she could’ve thought of. She tiptoes into the laundry room, pulling the door behind her as quietly as possible.

The light in the dryer doesn’t turn on when she opens the door, and she prays it’s not actually as loud as it seems to sound in her head. _Good luck finding me in here, Renner,_ she thinks as she folds herself up in the dryer and reaches for the dryer door. She doesn’t close it all the way, but she cracks it just enough that if he were to peek in, he wouldn’t be able to see her plaintively.

It’s moments like these that she thanks her lucky stars she’s not any taller.

“Okay, Scarlett!” she hears him thunder from somewhere in the house, his voice sounding far away. “I’m coming for ‘ya!”

She bites back the smile as she hugs her knees a little closer to her chest.

She sits in the dark and waits quietly. She’s patient – she knows this is a damn good spot and he won’t think to look for her in here, and the position she’s wiggled herself in is kind of comfortable if she can trick her brain into thinking that it’s not cold metal resting along the curve of her spine as she props her bare feet up on the wall of the dryer.

The time ticks by, Scarlett counting every breath as it enters and leaves her lungs while she waits. She can’t hear his footsteps anymore, so it means he’s on the opposite end of the house or is somewhere up on the third floor searching for her.

Her mind wanders and she doesn’t do anything to stop it. She lets herself think about how control hasn’t been in her clutches over the last few hours and how it surprisingly hasn’t bothered her, taking a backseat while the universe steers for a little while. The house hasn’t felt as empty in the way it did yesterday. Even if the ones outside have gone nowhere, the storm clouds over her head have rolled away. Little bits of sunshine pierced through them and broke them up. She knows the source of it, too, and it brings back that stupid warmth inside the pit of her stomach.

Whatever it means, she doesn’t know, and she’s not sure she wants to. Giving things a name means she fears it or respects it enough to label it, and she doesn’t want to start sticking labels to Jeremy. He’s just Jeremy. That’s all he’s supposed to be, all she needs for him to be, and that’s how it’s always been. The more she lets her brain wander, the more bricks it wiggles loose, and she’ll be damned if she lets her stupid brain mess anything else up. He’s just Jeremy. He makes her happy because he’s Jeremy and he always has, and she needs to put it to rest there.

And definitely not think about him shirtless.   

She suddenly hears the door to the laundry room open, jarring her from her thoughts. The saying must now differ – all one has to do is entertain a thought of the devil and he’ll appear. She instinctively holds her breath, grip around both of her knees tightening.

There’s a tiny flash of light sweeping around the room, and it takes everything in her not to swear out loud and give herself up a few seconds sooner.

The light stops right on the open dryer door, Scarlett pressing her forehead closer into her kneecaps as if eliminating him from her line of sight will keep him from seeing her altogether. His footsteps grow louder, closer, until they stop and the dryer door is swinging open to a tiny flood of an LED light.

“Oh my _god,_ ” Jeremy wheezes as he laughs. She peeks her head up, blinking a few times in the harsh glare of whatever flashlight he’s got shining on her. It takes her a second for her eyes to adjust but once they do, she sees him standing in front of the dryer, doubled over. “You are a fucking contortionist.”

“I’m tiny,” she grumbles. “And you’re a fucking cheater.”

He extends his free hand to her, helping pull her out of the ball she’s curled up into and onto her feet outside of the dryer. “Hey, we never said we couldn’t use a flashlight. Thank god I did, otherwise I would have accidentally spun you around a few times with the towels.”

“Oh, shut up.”

“I’ll give you that one, though, it was a good ass place to hide. I seriously thought you were outside.” It’s a tiny victory, tugging on the corners of her lips. He then presses something tiny into her hand – the little LED flashlight keychain that he used to find her. “Here ‘ya go. Count to one hundred.”

“See you in two minutes,” she teases him, throwing his own words back in his face.

Jeremy just scoffs. “You’ll never find me.”

“You can’t fit in the dryer. I’ll find you.”

In the little bit of light that she’s got directed at the wall, she can see his face twist up in a pout. “That’s just rude.”

“Ninety-seven…ninety-six…”

He scampers off to god knows where, Scarlett resuming the counting in her head while she swings his tiny keychain around her index finger and lets the light spin. The flashlight changes things. She’ll have him caught in under five minutes.

When she reaches zero, she steps out of the laundry room and closes the door behind her, marking it as a place she knows Jeremy is not. Unless, of course, he’s planning to be _that_ asshole and just run around in the dark changing up his hiding place. She’ll absolutely murder him if he does. “Here I come, Renner!” she yells out into the empty house, her voice echoing off of the walls.

There’s method to all of her madness, and she’s calculated as she sweeps through the house. It’s a game plan, a _plan_ , something that she knows she’s superior at and will surely lead her to victory. She starts on the ground floor and works clockwise around the staircase before she ascends a level. She gets eye level with the skirt around the couch and flings open every cabinet door even if she knows he can’t fit in there, just to be thorough.

She clears through the second floor slower, considering the number of bedrooms and nooks and crannies he could tuck himself into that need to be checked out. By the time she makes it back to the staircase and is heading up to the third floor, irritation is settling into her bones. _That bastard is running around,_ she thinks bitterly as she stomps heavier than she has been – light footing comes with the element of surprise, which she wants – up to her bedroom.

He’s nowhere. He’s absolutely nowhere, but she refuses to concede. She’ll climb into the goddamn walls if she has to. She decides to head back down to the second floor, still too much grey area there for him to have tucked away in (even if she did start throwing towels out of one of the tiny closets in the bathroom to uncover him). Bedroom after bedroom she goes, even more thorough in her exploration only to come up with nothing. She winds up in one of the bathrooms, hands on her hips as she stares at her reflection in the mirror.

And then, in the reflection, she sees it: the shower curtain is pulled all the way down the rail, stretched out from wall to wall. It wasn’t like that the first time she came through.

Oh, he’s _so_ busted.

She’s gonna play it up, too. She treads lightly over to the bath mat, purposefully pointing the little LED light in a different direction to throw him and lure him into the false sense of security. When she’s positioned right at the edge of the tub, she counts quietly to three before ripping back the shower curtain and grinning like the devil down into the tub. “Gotcha,” she sings as she turns the light on him, all teeth and glittering eyes.

He’s laying down in the bathtub, arms folded over his chest like someone’s lowering him down into his coffin. “Really?” she goes on, pushing back the curtain all the way and holding her hand out for him.

“Listen, I’d thought about getting in one of the tubs we filled up, but I knew I couldn’t hold my breath for that long.”

“I would have also killed you for that.”

“Yeah, there’s that too.” He steps fully out of the bathtub, fingers reaching out for the flashlight. “Your turn.”

The game continues on, because there’s something fun about the two of them stumbling around the house in the dark trying to find one another in whatever creative hiding place the other has seemingly found. Scarlett hides in the food pantry and swears that she’s been made, but Jeremy somehow misses her completely and doesn’t find her until his third run-through of the pantry when a box falls on her head and she squeaks involuntarily (he was mostly just looking for something to snack on because he was giving up, but he swears that’s not the case and it was all part of his master plan). Jeremy takes to the garage and hides on top of her rental car, to which she yells at him extensively for – “You could have _dented the roof!”_ “Are you insinuating something, Johansson?” – and completes a full inspection of said roof before they can continue the game. She then tucks away in a corner of her room behind all of her luggage on her turn, her legs cramping up within two minutes of being in the spot and praying that Jeremy finds her soon.

Jeremy’s next hiding place is a tiny closet, and to her severe disappointment, she doesn’t find him before he seemingly finds her. He’s got his own motives, too, because as she opens the door to the closet and begins ruffling through the contents, a pair of arms shoot out and grab her. It startles her – close to death, if the way her heart has skipped several beats says anything – and she barely catches herself before she screams.

There’s warmth surrounding her, the pair of arms tight around her waist and holding her close to something solid, something that smells like laundry detergent and pure sugar. Jeremy laughs in her ear, holding her as she trembles. “Hi, sweetheart,” he jokes.

“Oh, fuck you,” she swears, punching him in the chest as she draws out her words in annoyance.

There’s a heavy silence that follows, like he wants to follow up with something but something, be it better sense or divine intervention, has caught the words and stuffed them back in his throat and left them standing there pressed against each other with no real reason as to why. He’d scared her. He’d gotten his laugh. That’s it.

But it’s not, because they stay standing there and Scarlett doesn’t know where to put her eyes and the feeling of his hands on her are so heavy that they seem to realign her center of gravity. In her head, she is chanting at full volume that it means nothing, it shouldn’t be happening but it is and she needs to treat it like it’s whatever. Jeremy Renner is not someone who turns her into a flustered teenager.

Jeremy Renner is just Jeremy to her; he’s Jeremy, the guy that she would never let live down thinking Tilda Swinton played Brianne in Game of Thrones (the guy who kept a steady line of girls outside of his very-locked door), the guy who knew just how to make her laugh so hard she’d snort beer out of her nose (the guy who nearly caused a war between sororities over his affections), the guy who made her feel like herself every summer after a year of feeling like a well-oiled machine (the guy whose infamy in making girls feel good she’d heard about one too many times). This, here, now, it means nothing, and she tells herself so forcefully.

The tiny voice in her head takes the opportunity and prompts, _but what if?_

Her heart leaps so forcefully in her chest that it causes her to stumble back, shaking them from whatever moment they’ve gotten tangled in.

Jeremy’s hands are still hovering over her waist, his fingers singeing through the cotton fabric of her t-shirt as he touches her. “I, um…” She swallows, tongue heavy in her mouth. “I think I’m gonna go unwind, get ready for the night.” She trips over all her words, collection entirely lost to her.

He nods. “Sounds good.” If he’s anywhere as rattled as she is, he doesn’t show it. He drags his hands as he completely pulls away from her, Scarlett taking another tiny step in the opposite direction. “You’ll come back downstairs when you’re done?”

Because speaking is apparently now too complicated with the knot in her throat, she nods and gets the hell out of that closet before he can say anything else to her and turn her into even more of a flustered idiot.

It’s a time like this when she wishes she could turn the shower on, put the water all the way over on ‘hot’ and let the hellfire pelt her brain clean of thoughts. Instead, she takes extra care in scrubbing her makeup off and forcefully brushing her teeth to hopefully do the trick. Whatever game her mind is trying to trick her into playing isn’t some fun, harmlessly stupid game invented by Chris Evans. It’s a tight rope that she doesn’t have enough balance to walk.

Scarlett forces her eyes to meet her own in the mirror’s reflection, hauntingly cast thanks to the flashlight on her phone. “Don’t,” she says out loud to herself, her voice wobbly. “Don’t go there.” She breathes in deeply and exhales. “Get it under control.”

The minute she lets go of control, she starts spinning off the rails? Yeah, sounds fitting. Time to get it back.

By the time she puts on her pajamas, texts Lizzie a good-night-and-good-luck message, and heads back downstairs, she feels like she’s got a few more wits about her and the living room has significantly changed. Jeremy’s blown out most of the candles and resorted to a flashlight, sitting it on the floor and facing it up towards the ceiling so it lights the entire room. He’s arranged chairs from the kitchen table around the same space where they had their picnic, blankets draped across the surface and brushing over the back of the couch.

He looks up at her right as he finishes adjusting one of the comforters so it won’t slouch. “I made a few improvements to your setup,” he explains sheepishly, and the way he smiles at her lights her up.

“Blanket fort?” she deduces as she walks slowly down the stairs.

“I say pillow fort, but you know. Potato, po-tah-to.”

“Where’d you get all of these ideas?” she finds herself asking as she walks around and gets a scope for his handiwork. “The power must go out all the time in Nevada.”

“I’m one of seven kids, several of whom already have kids of their own. You think I became everyone’s favorite with just this winning smile of mine?”

“Well, there is this thing called a bribe. You do happen to have quite the stuffed wallet, Mister Realtor.”

He just laughs, leaving her alone as he crawls inside his blanket – pillow – fort. She stops her pacing at the mouth, where he’s looking up at her, light of his laptop illuminating the inside of his fort. “You want me to bribe children?” He rests a hand over his chest, feigning offense. “You’re a terrible influence.”

She rolls her eyes, ignoring him altogether. “Make room.”

Before she can get underneath the first blanket, he stops her by holding one of his legs up and blocking the entrance. “Password,” he requests, blinking innocently at her when her eyes narrow into a glare.

“There is no password.”

“Oh, but there is. More of a fee, really, seeing as how you owe me for not saying a certain ‘C’ word that rhymes with preserve…”

She smacks his leg down. “Shut up.”

“This is abuse,” he whines as she crawls over him, making sure to put her entire body weight onto his shins when she forcefully makes her way to the other side of the pillow fort. “Best friend abuse!”

“Hush.” Scarlett rolls over, flouncing back into a small pile of pillows that are nestled against the corner of the couch.

His eyes are like little daggers as they pierce into her. “I know all the places you’re ticklish. Don’t test me, Scarls.”

“I’m terrified of you,” she says, void of all emotion. One of his hands comes darting out towards her, beelining straight for her ribs. Her instincts are faster, catching his hand forcefully right about the time she rolls over so her back is blocking him. “Renner.”

“Johansson.”

“I’m going to give you your hand back on the grounds you don’t do anything stupid that will warrant the loss of it.”

“When you least expect it,” he promises her with a wink, withdrawing his hand once she lets go and using it to pull his laptop closer.

She shifts so she’s flat on her back, feet planted on the floor and her knees bent. “So, I only have two movies on this thing,” he prefaces, finger dancing over the trackpad as he searches for something. “You get to pick.”

Her hand rests over her heart, the flattered gesture mocking. “What a gentleman.”

“Your choices are Atlantis: The Lost Empire or Coming to America.”

“Atlantis.”

He raises both of his eyebrows. “You don’t think that’s an odd pick considering the ocean could sweep us up and take us there at any time with this storm?”

“It’s Disney. And you said I got to pick.” She pokes him in the arm. “Atlantis.”

“Yes ma’am,” he drawls with no further comment, finding the movie.

He leans forward, putting the laptop on top of the ottoman at the other end of the fort and adjusting the screen so they can see it. She pulls one of the blankets off to the side over her legs as the screen goes black and Jeremy situates himself back beside her.

He then nudges her in the arm, catching her attention. When she glances over at him, he’s procuring something from beside him and then holds it up in offering. It’s another package of Zebra Cakes – one for each of them.

“You are literally trying to keep me from fitting in my bathing suit,” she groans.

“The Zebra Cake is not going to put a dent in your bikini body. Promise.”

“Yes, but if we play hide and seek again, it might be the thing that puts a dent on the roof of my car.” He disregards the bitterness in her voice as he tears open the plastic, fishing one out and offering it to her. “I’ve already brushed my teeth,” she protests weakly – her words say one thing but her actions another, taking it from him anyways.

“We’re on vacation. Live a little.”

She gets comfortable as the movie starts, the right side of her body pressed up against his left and her blanket eventually spreading over his shins as well. They watch the movie in relative silence; occasionally, she’ll look over to make sure he’s still awake (and truthfully, alive) and his eyes will meet hers in that _what?_ look of his. It’s like his wordless reminder that he’s here with her and that he’s not going anywhere. Every time, she gives him a small smile and returns back to the movie.

They clear through Atlantis, pause for a bathroom break and then decide to go ahead with watching Coming to America anyways. It’s not as if they’ve got anything else better to do. Scarlett feels herself getting pliant and fuzzy as the movie plays on, bunching the blanket up closer around her neck and consciously pressing further into Jeremy’s side. She’s comfortable, and the steady warmth radiating off of Jeremy’s skin encompasses her like a hug. At one point during the movie, he stretches his arm around the back of the pillows she’s leaning against and she wiggles a little closer into his side.

Somewhere in her brain, she hears the words _maybe not_ before another voice swiftly tells that voice to shut the hell up.

The movie finishes but they’ve still got a little battery life left. Jeremy rummages around on his laptop to see what else he has; there’s a stray half-season of Everybody Loves Raymond that he can’t explain having downloaded and they watch as many of those that they can until his laptop finally dies. When it does, they sit there in the darkness for a moment without saying anything.

“Well, there goes our entertainment,” Jeremy breaks through their bubble, sitting up to close the laptop.

“And what do you call my company? Boring?”

“Your company,” he answers simply. “Which I’ve been really happy to have, you know.”

He lays back down next to her, Scarlett rolling over on her side so she’s facing him even in the dark. “I’d really be bored out of my mind if I was by myself.”

“I’m happy you’re here, too,” she tells him quietly, resting her hands underneath her head. “I would have probably driven up to Myrtle Beach and gotten swept off the road by a gust of wind all in attempt to not be by myself.”

In the dark, she sees him nod against the pillow. “Thank god we, the two people who hate being alone, got trapped together.”

Her lips twitch into a frown. “I don’t hate being alone,” she counters. “I just don’t like what I become when I get lonely.”

“Which is?”

She sighs. “Neurotic.”

“You? Never.”

“I do stupid shit when I’m lonely. I have sex in the elevator of my apartment building, or decide I need to organize a fundraiser for homeless dogs, or just do something that’s generally moronic that I feel what I’m pretty sure is regret after the fact. I still feel empty when all’s said and done. Sometimes, literally.”

“Do you pencil these into your ever-so-busy schedule?”

“Hell no,” she scoffs. “It’s _why_ I keep my schedule so busy. If I’m busy, then it means somebody’s stuffing something in me, even if it is a filler. If I’m busy, I don’t have time to think about me being lonely and wasting my life away.”

“You are not wasting your life away,” he chides. “You’d be wasting your life away if you had gone through with marrying what’s-his-face.”

“Nate?”

“No. The one who actually proposed.”

“Nate _was_ the one who actually proposed.”

Jeremy begins snapping his fingers, as if it will bring the answer to the forefront of his mind faster. “The one who told you he was gonna propose and you literally moved to a new zip code to avoid him.”

“Oh, that was Colin.”

“Yeah, him. You could be his wife right now, stuck at home raising kids. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course, but…” He pauses while he thinks, turning his head in her direction when it finally comes to him. “It just doesn’t seem like that would make you happy.”

He’s right: it wouldn’t. It was why she’d moved to a new zip code in the aftermath.

“What about you?” She pokes his bicep again. “Is that what you’re waiting on? Just can’t find it?”

Jeremy lets out a bitter laugh. “I’m sure if I looked hard enough, I could find it. Just not all that interested.”

“In being married?”

“In settling.”  

She gets that. She’s not a stranger to settling – she feels like she does it every time something remotely romantic pops up on her radar. It’s the price she pays for filling her days and her life up to the brim, everything neatly laid out in the J-Bible. She has to settle because there’s never enough room or time to find something she’d really actually want, and even if she gets close, there’s nothing she’s got written in the J-Bible on how to maintain a relationship, on how to let somebody in beyond all the schedules and the routine and the desperate need to be somebody that she knows, deep down, she’s not. She settles for who she is and what she’s become eleven months out of the year. She _knows_ settling.

Quietly, she nods in understanding. Jeremy keeps going, mostly thinking out loud. “If I’m gonna do all that commitment shit, I don’t want it to be with someone that I’m just with out of convenience’s sake, y’know? That was college.”

“It was?” she repeats incredulously.

He looks mildly annoyed. “You really think I _wanted_ to be with any of those girls? I mean…okay, some of them, I wanted to be with, but it was never like I wanted to give ‘em the world and everything I had to offer. Surely you picked up on that.”

“I picked up on the criteria of what the girls you slept with fit. Sorority, stacked, and at least seventy percent unhinged.”

“And you think I’d want to spend the rest of my life with someone who I have to worry about coming at me with a knife? No fuckin’ thanks.”

“They weren’t all knife-wielding maniacs,” she reminds him.

“Ninety-seven percent were.”

“And a whopping three percent weren’t.”

“It’s still settling.” She gives him that. He sighs shallowly, arms folded behind his head as he stares up at the blanketed ceiling. “Sometimes the loneliest I’ve ever been was always whenever I was in the company of other people. I’d rather be physically alone at thirty with no strings and bored outta my fuckin’ mind than with somebody who makes me feel completely lonely.”  

“You’re almost thirty, you’re not one foot in the grave. You’ll find somebody.”

She hears his head rustle on the pillow and in the dark, can see his lips peel back in a smile. “You’ll find ‘em first, sweetheart.” She doesn’t really know what to say to that, but he fortunately saves her and keeps talking. “How long do you think this storm’s gonna keep up?”

“Hopefully not much longer – that’s just for everyone else’s sake. All this weird energy in the air’s got Liz feeling particularly murderous.”

“What are you saying?” he teases, poking her in the ribs. She squirms away from him, shooting him the glare of death once her back is flush against the couch. “You actually like being here with me?”

“’Course I do.” She’s not sure if he can see the bewilderment reflecting in her eyes but she knows it’s there in full force. “I’m glad you’re here.”

“Cross your heart?”

She just barely suppresses her laugh. “And hope to die.”

“Well, don’t hope for it too much, we’re still not outta the woods with this storm.”

Scarlett smiles at him, adjusting the blanket that she’s underneath so it’s tucked underneath her chin tightly. “So, what do you wanna do tomorrow?” she asks quietly. The way it slips past her lips is almost childlike – all of the fun she’s had today has left her wanting to take advantage of every second she has with just her and Jeremy in the house. Tomorrow’s a new adventure, a blank canvas that they can throw as much paint on as their hearts desire until they’re sated and ready to hang it up on the wall.

“Whatever you wanna do,” Jeremy answers. “Unless it’s ‘watch a movie,’ in which case I don’t think I can make that happen.”

“Maybe the power will be back on. Or you could just reenact the entirety of E.T. by yourself.”

He laughs, the whine and wheeze of a smoker filling her ears. “I am not reenacting E.T. Not even for you.”

“Bummer. That could be the performance standing between you and an Oscar.”

“I think I’ll live.” She nestles deeper into her pillow; sleep seems to be creeping up on her, faster and faster the longer they lay here in the dark and just talk. “Seriously, though. Whatever you want, we’ll do it.”

“There’s nothing you wanna do?”

“I just want to spend time with you, Scar. I don’t care what we do.”

A sleepy smile drifts across her face. “That’s sweet.”

“It’s practically my middle name.”

Out of nowhere, a yawn rips straight through her chest. “You’re tired,” Jeremy observes with a small laugh. “Go to sleep, Scar.”

“’M not tired,” she slurs in the aftermath, suddenly aware of how heavy her eyes feel and how comfortable this blanket fort is despite them being on a hardwood floor.

“Yes, you are. C’mon.” She feels him throw another half of the blanket he’s acquired over the side of her that’s closest to him, situating it so it’s snug over her hip. “We can talk about how sweet I am in the morning.”

“Technically, it’s already morning,” she points out, closing her eyes.

“Okay, smartass. Goodnight.”

“’Night.”

She doesn’t stay awake much longer after that, but even as sleep claims her for its own, she’s aware of his proximity to her. He’s close, body turned inwards so he’s facing her, and a small part of her thinks that she wouldn’t want it any other way.


	3. time stands still and it's only us

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WELL, HERE WE ARE at yet the end of another road. i don't think i can adequately express JUST how i feel knowing that i am about to finish another multichap; if you know me, you know i am _not_ the best at actually seeing things through to completion and the amount of stuff that i've finished? and am able to like, enjoy in full because i actually fucking finished it? it's a weird feeling, but i mostly attribute that to the fact i'm so inspired and i've got the greatest motivators in the world: a couple of dumbasses, spotify premium, and all the lovely people who just come hang out and read my stories in their free time. i'm literally just writing things for my own selfish gain and the fact y'all are enjoying it too makes it all the more worthwhile!!! big thanks to amanda and shelby for your steadfast encouragement, without y'all this idea probably would have just sat in my notes for the foreseeable future and collected dust. also, props to this song. it's the reason i was able to stay awake at 2am when i would write this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiMasQsW4OQ
> 
> i can't speak as to what will be my next rennerson multichapter — i've got a few more oneshot ideas for them that i definitely wanna get written and by that point inspiration may have struck yet again! but as of right now, i think the next time you'll see me is with a clintasha multichapter...which like, y'all gotta be nice to me because writing clintnat intimidates the SHIT out of me. anyways. i love y'all. if you're still reading this, you can't like, say a cool codeword and redeem it in the comments for a free ice cream, but...know i would give you one if i could. 
> 
> don't be scared to come say hello in a comment on your way out, i promise i don't bite! chapter title comes from (can you guess?) the jonas brothers' "strangers". you can find me on twitter @emswifts, instagram @strrlights and tumblr @nvtasha, where you're welcomed with open arms and a jumbo box of tissues since i am NOT over anything that's occurred in the last 3 months of life. happy reading xx

All morning, Scarlett’s back feels like it’s made out of driftwood. It’s not like it matters, though, because the silver linings outweigh it – the power is back on, the storm has dwindled down to a rain shower, Jeremy’s making pancakes for breakfast, and she woke up with Jeremy’s body curled around hers like a fucking comma.

She didn’t know how that happened, but it wasn’t like she was complaining any. He was a human furnace, warm and snuggly, and taking inventory of every ridge of muscle on his chest that she felt pressed into her back was a fun way to pass the time until he started to stir behind her. She’d rolled back over and gone back to sleep when he slipped out of the fort to do god only knew what, but the loss of a body behind her was noticed. Severely noticed, with twinges of disappointment around the edges.

It's not like she’s in the position to do so, but she could’ve gotten used to that.

Jeremy makes pancakes and they count it a victory since nothing caught on fire – “Burnt edges give it character, Scar.” – and after, Scarlett runs into the master shower with her arms wide open. She washes away the stiffness in her limbs and the faint traces of Jeremy on her skin and shampoos her hair twice because she feels utterly disgusting after the last two days of whore baths. She shaves her legs and then has the decency to stop the love affair with the hot water rolling down her spine since Jeremy’s still here and there’s a chance he’d like to feel the same thing as well.

He grabs a shower once she’s finished and she kills time by sitting on the couch scrolling through the last few hours of social media she’s missed out on, solely because she needs a physical look into the hotel madness one state over. According to intel from Cobie, the storm isn’t as bad in Myrtle anymore but the roads are still a toss-up. They’re all simply living on the trigger as they await some sort of sign from the state of North Carolina or God himself that it’s go time. Scarlett sifts through the posts where Sebastian takes up the entire mattress starfished out across everyone underneath him – that would explain the Sebbo the Starfish nickname – and where Hemsworth is chronicling his adventures in the airport in a twenty-part-and-counting Instagram story.   

Part of her will be glad when everyone’s back in the house. The other part of her is bummed that it won’t just be her and Jeremy anymore. She’ll have to actually share him, and the way that now tastes in her mouth isn’t pleasant.

Jeremy emerges onto the staircase, towel-drying his hair. He doesn’t have his shirt on yet, the article of clothing in question slung over one of his arms and his athletic shorts dangerously low on his hips. It makes something flare up inside of her chest and the entire area around her neck is suddenly scratchy.

The Jeremy problem hasn’t gotten better. In fact, it seems that all telling herself not to go there has done is make her speed through the express lane to there.

She can’t make sense of it, and that alone is driving her so crazy that she nicked herself twice when shaving because of how entangled it made her brain. Jeremy’s always been her friend and nothing else, and now, what, he pulls her into a closet and sleeps next to her one night and it’s as though he’s the first man she’s ever laid eyes on? There’s something about the sharp turn they’ve taken that she can’t quite put her finger on, can’t exactly name. Whatever it is, she can no longer unsee it, even if she is scrambling to cover her eyes back up.

It’s a change, and she’s met her fucking quota of change in her life for the next ten years in the last forty-eight hours.

“So, what do you wanna do today?” he asks, stopping once he’s in front of the couch.

Him being close to her and shirtless is no longer just a nice little pause her brain hits, it’s downright dangerous. “I dunno,” she answers him half-heartedly, keeping somewhere around eighty percent of her brain on the suddenly intriguing ad on her phone’s screen.

“You dunno?” Jeremy repeats, throwing his towel onto the coffee table that’s back in its rightful place after his dismantling of their blanket fort while she was in the shower. “Surely the girl who has a plan for everything has a plan for today.”

She wants to tell him that no, she doesn’t have a plan for today, because it seems she’s forgotten how to properly function around him and that makes her fully incapable of doing anything. She wants to shove the reins back in his hands because it’s surprisingly been nice shutting a part of herself down in order to let the rest of her thrive.

“Not really,” she mumbles. Jeremy flops down on the couch next to her, propping both his feet up on the coffee table. “I’m on vacation. I take the month off planning.”

He turns, face flattened in a deadpan. “Coming from the person who singlehandedly orchestrated that horrific parasailing adventure a few years ago, I’m left with reason to believe that you’re a filthy liar.”

It cracks a smile on her face as she finally shifts her sights over to him. “I just wanna hang out with you,” she replies evenly. “I don’t care what we do.”

Silence envelops them for a moment, save for the sound of the cogs turning in his head. She’d be fine just to sit here on the couch in the silence and stare at the walls if it means she’s in his company. He finally cracks his knuckles and makes note of the shelf filled with board games and challenges her to a round of Sorry, which she gladly accepts.

They spend the day going through every game on the shelf – he kicks her ass in Sorry, she flattens him in Scrabble, and when their game of checkers runs through lunch, Jeremy accidentally uses an Oreo as a checker – and Jeremy offers to make dinner for them, leaving Scarlett to a few moments with her book. It’s hard to get through a single chapter because she can hear Jeremy singing in the kitchen and she wants nothing more than to film it for Lizzie’s blackmail collection and have the image stored in her brain for posterity’s sake. She eventually puts down the book and tries to help him, only having her efforts denied because apparently, she would be the reason they get food poisoning.

“I take offense,” she says, miffed and turning her back to him.

“So would my digestive system,” he laughs.

The songs on the radio – via the app on his phone, not the clunky stereo from the garage – shift to one that she likes and one that he knows she likes, and he draws closer to her with a stupid grin on his face. “Dance with me.”

“You can’t dance.”

Jeremy scoffs. “Rude.”

She maintains her stance and unflappability even when he grabs her hand and tugs her close, trying to move her limbs along with his into something that resembles dancing. It’s fun, purposefully locking up and watching him struggle to get her to move. He’s persistent though, one of his hands resting in what is probably a very risky spot on her hip and the other clutched tightly around hers with a spatula sandwiched between their palms.  

“C’mon, baby, lighten up,” he coaxes. “You love this song.”

“I do love this song,” she points out, still stiff in his arms.

He begins to obnoxiously sing along – he might not be a good dancer but he’s a good singer, even when he pitches his voice to purposefully sound bad. It wears down at her defenses exactly the way he wants and she breaks out into a smile, loosening up and letting him twirl her around the kitchen table.

The moment ends when the smoke alarm starts to go off.

“Oh, who’s the one ruining dinner now?” she teases him as she slumps up against one of the chairs. He scowls and flips her off, grabbing the dish towel and jumping up with it to try and break up some of the smoke near the detector.

“Jump a little higher!” she advises.

“Shut the hell up!”

Only a tiny fraction of her is glad something came along and ruined the moment. Every second he’s within fingertip length and smiling at her she grows more and more unsure about whether she can trust herself around him. She knows that she probably shouldn’t. The more she thinks about him, the less and less resistance she finds herself met with.

They get through dinner in one piece and with the structure of the house still standing. Scarlett retires out to the porch after they clean up with her book tucked under her arm. He lets her slip away, preoccupied with something in the kitchen. Out from under whatever spell he puts on her, she feels like she’s able to breathe. Whenever he’s around, it’s impossible not to fall in his orbit, and she might as well be another piece of space junk trapped in the gravitational pull.

She barely gets two pages read before the telltale creak of the door to the house splits through the night and Jeremy’s joining her.

“You talked to Liz any today?” he asks, each hand clutched to a ceramic mug. He extends one to her as he stops at the edge of the couch – the first glance into the mug tells her that it’s coffee, and she carefully takes it from him.

“A little bit. The roads held them back from going anywhere today since they don’t know the state of things, but my bet is they’re blowing that popsicle stand come tomorrow morning. Any longer all cramped up there and World War Three will actually begin.”

“I’m surprised they’ve stuck out as long as they have.” Scarlett slides over and makes room for Jeremy, his knee brushing against hers when he sits down. “With one bed?”

“Guess they figure they stand a better chance actually in hell than getting in a car that’s escaping like a bat out of hell.”

 Jeremy holds his mug towards her. “I’d drink to that.”

“You’d drink to anything.” She nudges her mug against his before bringing it up to her lips, the gentle curve of her smile shying behind the rim.

Goddammit, the man even knew how to make her coffee the way she likes. Screwed. She is hopelessly and profoundly screwed.

“You’re not wrong.”

She’s quiet for a few moments, getting lost in the bottom of her mug as the sound of the waves lapping at the shore in the distance turn all her thoughts into a dull hum. “Guess that means we’ll be back to regularly scheduled programming,” she finds herself muttering.

Jeremy’s head turns slightly to look at her. “You glad?”

 _No,_  she thinks.  _Not really._  One of her shoulders bends in a shrug. “This has been nice. Me, you.” It’s her turn to face the music and shift her eyes over to Jeremy, meeting his stormy grey irises head on. “We don’t really hang out much, just the two of us.”

His lips crack in a grin. “Yeah, well, Lizzie and the girls tend to hold you hostage. I’m not one to interfere.”

“Maybe you should more often,” she finds herself saying, the words leaving her mouth without her brain’s permission.

“Yeah?”

She takes another long drink of her coffee, suddenly feeling like she’s sipping on the ocean and is on the verge of drowning. “Yeah.”

It’s a heavy silence that fills the space around them. Jeremy breaks their eye contact as he leans forward to put his coffee mug on the table, and when he speaks, Scarlett suddenly presses the trigger and launches into some kind of sentence (which is mostly an experiment to see if she’s still breathing – the answer is only just).

“Do you—”

“We—”

They both stop, Scarlett feeling the fires light in her cheeks and Jeremy laughing nervously. “Go ahead, Scar.”

She shakes her head. “No, I interrupted. You first.” She weakly gestures towards him to emphasize.

“Can we…can I do something?”

“Whatever you want,” she answers lightly, because that’s been the default response to that question all weekend.

She thinks he’s going to suggest something like camping out on the screened-in porch or get all the bedrooms prank ready for their friends or maybe even going back inside and watching a movie. The last thing she expects is for him to shift closer so his thigh is pressed firmly against hers, his fingertips ghosting over her elbow and his face suddenly moving towards hers at a speed that she’s barely got time to register before the breath catches in her throat and he is so close that he is an attack on her every sense, every fucking nerve ending. But that’s exactly what he does, and she can’t find anywhere in her that regrets giving him permission to go ahead and ruin their friendship.

At this point, she is screaming at him, _ruin it._

His lips brush against hers, so careful and gentle for something that feels like a missile slamming right into her ribs and creating an opening for her heart to leap out of. Scarlett can feel the entire world start to tip under her feet as she hits the pause button. It’s a moment that she aches to freeze in time, a moment so heady that has wiped her brain of knowledge as basic as breathing. The kiss ends right as it really begins, light enough that she swears she’s gone and dreamed it, nothing more than the rush of the wind blowing past her.

She opens her eyes carefully, scared she won’t find him there after all, but he’s there and his grey eyes have turned into a storm. She’s breathing like she’s run a marathon and the way he looks straight through her does not help matters.

“Was that okay?” he asks, the timbre of his voice buried in the fault line of her bones and leaving little cracks as it races through her. Scarlett’s not sure she’s got a voice left, so she nods.

His hands are suddenly tangling with hers and he’s pulling the coffee cup out of her hand, doing god only knows what with it. “Can I do it again?”

She surprises herself by grabbing his face with both newly-freed hands and capturing his lips for her own, the same way she has in every thought she’s forced herself to repress since he grabbed her in that godawful closet. His hands clutch at her wrists to keep her there.

It’s slow, Scarlett tracing his lower lip with her tongue and tasting coffee, but the need for him begins to grow at the same rate of the franticness at which they learn each other. His hands map out the curves of her body, tugging her closer and drawing her in deeper to the point where she finds herself haphazardly tugged into his lap. He keeps whispering “Is this okay?” every time they surface for air, as he outlines the slope of her jawline with kisses and scrapes his teeth over the pulse point in her neck, and she just wants to slap him because _of course_ it’s okay, it’s all she’s been trying not to think about for the last forty-eight hours. All she wants his him. Anything he wants to do with her, to her, it’s all okay. She’d jump off of the roof if that was what he wanted.

“Scar,” he groans against her skin, his voice melting her from the inside out into a puddle in his fingers. “We should…”

“Yeah,” she finishes for him, arms draping around his neck. They don’t let each other finish a complete thought before they’re drawn back towards one another’s lips, making sure whatever’s rushing through their systems is flushed out for the time it’ll take them to stand up and walk back inside.

He clutches tight to her hand, Scarlett wrapping both around his as he leads her back inside the house and up the stairs all the way to the master bedroom.

“You’re gorgeous,” he whispers in her ear when he pins her up against the door before it gets the chance to fully shut back in place, teeth grazing along her earlobe.

She’s breathless, just barely getting out, “Bet you say that to all the girls.”                            

Jeremy’s hands shoot up underneath her shirt and the warmth of his fingers is like a jolt of electricity through her system. “Only the gorgeous ones.”

It’s playing with fire. He’s melted her so far down that she leans into his touch when he tears her shirt off her, and she can taste the ash on her lips when she kisses a trail across his bare chest. Their clothes are collateral damage and Scarlett is dizzy as she keeps breathing in the smoke, keeps breathing in _him._ Only him. He’s a firestorm under her fingers and he drinks her in desperately, as if he’s trying to quench a thirst that’s never truly going to go away. Not like she minds – for him she’ll be pliant, let him take whatever he wants because she needs whatever it is that he wants.

She gets his shorts tugged down, her hand just barely cupping his boxers when he suddenly stops her, pulling both hands away from him and pinning them against the door. “Me later, sweetheart. Let me make you feel good first.”

Whatever argument she could present to him dies in her throat as their legs tangle, Jeremy half-pushing half-carrying her towards the bed. It’s like she figured; she’s no stranger to the rumors of the magic that Jeremy Renner would work in bed, hence the steady swarm of sorority girls buzzing around him. Of course he’s pushing her back on the bed and stripping her shorts and panties off in one go to make it about her.

Damn if he isn’t good at it too.

Jeremy takes his precious time between her legs, exploring her and learning exactly how to play her body in order to draw out the melodies of the whimpers in her throat and coax her climax towards its crescendo. He’s so good at it, so good on her and around her and in her that it makes her fucking teeth ache and entire body throb at just how desperately she wants him. He smiles at her, the storm in his eyes only getting darker as he pushes her closer and closer to the edge.

When she comes, his name catches in the back of her throat and he pulls it out with a kiss once she starts to come back into herself. “Anybody ever told you you’re good at that?” she asks, her words slurring together against the sharp contrast of the way she can taste herself in the corners of his mouth.

He smirks – it’s a look on him that makes her want to flip them over and figure out every possible way she can to unhinge his control. “Once or twice.”

“The number of times you made me come,” she guesses playfully.

He kisses her again and she pulls him down to her because she’s not had nearly enough yet. She tells him that too.

“Whatever the lady wants.”

The sound he makes when he pushes into her is one that her mind tucks away for another rainy day when she’ll need a memory like this, one of her new favorite sounds. She rakes her fingernails down his back as he drives into her over and over again, the threads of her orgasm white hot as they build up and curl around her insides. “Scarlett,” he mutters against her skin as he kisses every fucking inch of her body. There are wildest dreams and then there’s this. She’ll do anything to make sure she hears her name rolling off his tongue again, so she does. Every time he says it is another little victory she puts on her shelf because goddamn, she can’t remember drowning in somebody quite like she has him.

She draws him in as deep as she can and begs for him to completely unravel her, and it’s exactly like he says: whatever she wants.

When they’re both spent and laying in a tangle of sweaty limbs, trying to catch their breath, Jeremy laces the fingers of her hand between his own. “Was that okay?” he asks, voice rough enough to draw shivers along her skin.

Scarlett thinks he might be crazy, and if he wasn’t currently halfway laying on her free arm, she’d use it to smack him. Okay is an understatement. Okay is basement level, and the sex she’s just had was somewhere up near the vaulted ceiling of the penthouse.

She answers him with a kiss, and she sighs at the way she can shape him right under her fingertips into whatever she wants. It feels dangerous to think of him as hers, but for this tiny moment in time, he is, and she’s going to milk it for whatever it happens to be worth.

One of her eyebrows kinks when she pulls away, the pads of her fingers lightly tracing over the stubble near his jaw. “Up for more?”

“With you?” he answers, tucking her hair back behind her ear as she hovers over him. “We can go all fuckin’ night if you want.”

The grin she gives him is all teeth. “Excellent. ‘Cause it’s officially later.”

She swears she sees his eyes roll back into his head.

Their coffee goes forgotten, and eventually, cold.

* * *

“Morning, honey,” a raspy voice purrs in Scarlett’s ear. Her toes curl at the warmth that flowers from her belly and out into the vines of her limbs. It tugs a lazy smile on her face, the sound, and it makes her mind board a cloud and start drifting down a river. Said river mostly consists of thoughts about Jeremy’s hands on her. Early morning sex is an idea she could get behind with the right amount of persuasion – not like it would take much of that.

“Pet names?” she murmurs sleepily. “We doin’ that?”

“We’ve been doing it since my freshman year, mama, get it together.”

The blissful, post-coital sleep is quickly ripped out from underneath her, Scarlett’s eyes shooting open. Her cloud has suddenly been drowned in her river by the kind force of reality. She flips over on the mattress, her fist clutching tight to the sheet and holding it up against her chest. Kneeling at the foot of the bed somewhere next to her calves is the silhouette of what a brief second’s thought entertains as a demon, but quickly dismisses and recognizes as none other than Elizabeth Olsen.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” Scarlett hisses between clenched teeth as she jerks into an upright position against the headboard, trying not to wake up the sleeping man next to her that Lizzie obviously has not registered the presence of. It’s still somewhat dark in the room where she’d drawn the curtains tight, only the slightest bit of morning sunlight filtering through them.

She focuses in on Lizzie, who’s leaning back on her haunches with a perplexed look on her face. “What do you mean?” God, Scarlett wants to wring her fucking neck – has she always been so damn loud? “Chris woke us all up at four with the announcement that it wasn’t raining anymore and that we were leaving. We just pulled in like, five minutes ago. Surprise.”

“No, what are you doing in  _here?”_

Lizzie seems to be under the impression that Scarlett thinks she’s speaking French. “It’s our room. Mine and yours? We share like we do every year? Damn, my ass is dragging and somehow I’m more awake than you.”

She suppresses the irritated eyeroll and instinctive comeback of  _yeah, well I didn’t exactly spend my night sleeping._

“Lizzie—”

“Why are you acting so  _weird_ —"

They both trip over each other’s words before being effectively cut off by the sound of a muffled snore in the pillow. Scarlett feels the ice shoot through her bloodstream as she looks down at Jeremy, afraid Lizzie’s big mouth has gone and woken him up. In the shitty lighting of the room, his eyes appear to be closed. She doesn’t want to get back down on eye-level and test her theory in case she’s wrong – she’s also not one hundred percent sure she can move, now that Lizzie’s fully toppled over on her shins.

“Oh my god.” Lizzie scrambles off the bed like somebody’s shocked her, steadily backing up towards the door the second her feet hit the floor. “Oh my…oh my god,  _oh my god!”_

If her looks had any tangible power, the one Scarlett shoots Lizzie would turn her into stone. “Shut up!” she shrills, pushing the sheet back and shifting out of bed as carefully as she can, desperate not to wake up Jeremy.

Lizzie’s eyes are dead-locked onto her, so wide she can see the whites even from across the room. She mouths, “Oh my  _god!”_

Scarlett reaches around blindly on the floor for her underwear and t-shirt, never taking her eyes off Lizzie. She seems to have slipped into full shock, gaping like a fish. “Outside,” Scarlett whispers, nodding in direction of the door. Lizzie doesn’t need to be told twice the way she rushes out of the room and back into the hall like some kind of stray bullet.

Well, so much for keeping it between her and Jeremy.

She’s just pulling her shirt down over her stomach when she quietly slips out, bringing the door to a close behind her. Lizzie may as well still be standing in the doorway, looking as though she’s a few seconds away from passing out.

“Oh my god, I’m gonna throw up,” she laments, hunched over in the middle with both hands resting on her knees. “It is too fucking early in the morning to have been that close to Renner’s dick.”

“Okay, chill the fuck out with the dramatics,” Scarlett mutters irritably. She’d been looking forward to that morning sex, too. Now she’s standing at the funeral of her libido. “It’s not that big of a deal.”

Lizzie looks downright scandalized. “Not that— _Scarlett Ingrid Johansson_ ,” she swears, edge of hysteria making her voice crack as she tries to keep quiet. “I just walked in on you and Jeremy.”

“Asleep,” Scarlett forcefully adds.

“Doesn’t matter!” Lizzie gestures wildly. “You are standing here wearing Jeremy’s shirt because I busted in on you after last night’s apparent fuck-fest!”

She glances down – sure enough, it’s Jeremy’s shirt that she’s picked up in the complete dark. “We are not in the seventh grade,” Scarlett bites back. “Grow up. It’s sex. I have it, you have it, it’s not a big deal.”

Lizzie’s hands are knotted in the roots of her hair, off in her own little universe as she reels. “What happened to our tie system?”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t realize you guys were getting here at the ass-end of dawn! When you’re the only two people in the house, it doesn’t really cross your mind that maybe you ought to tie a sock to the fucking door handle! Who’s gonna take note of it? The dust bunnies?”

“There is a system!” Lizzie claps her hands. “For a reason!”

“You know, there is this magical gesture they’ve invented to prevent issues like this, it’s called  _knocking_ —"

“Why did you not start with, ‘oh, hey Liz, nice to see you, Jeremy’s bare ass is about six inches away from you so you might wanna get off the bed’ the minute you saw me there?”

“I was too busy trying to figure out if you were real or just fucking Samara from The Ring!”

Lizzie’s glare cuts into her like a knife, but most of the initial reaction seems to have run its course and exited her system. She takes a deep breath, collecting herself. “Okay, so…you and Jeremy.”

“Had sex,” Scarlett finishes for her, hands settling on her hips.

“Yes. That much I have deduced.” Scarlett rolls her eyes. “I need you to start from the beginning.”

“Lizzie, it’s five in the morning.”

“Yeah, and after what I just walked in on, there’s not a frozen chance in hell that I’ll be getting back to sleep.” She folds her arms over her chest, looking at Scarlett expectantly. “Start talking.”

Scarlett sighs. She’s not sure she’s got it in her to walk Lizzie through the last few days of her life, because she doesn’t know how to make sense of them herself. Her and Jeremy were the only two in the house when the roads closed and the storm hit pause on everything, and somewhere between then and now they’ve gravitated together in more ways than one.

“I don’t know, we’ve just kinda spent the last few days hanging out since we’re kind of the only company we’ve had, and he’s gotten me out of my head when I was pissed at the world that things weren’t going my way—”

“—that doesn’t surprise me—”

“—and…I don’t fuckin’ know, Liz, one minute we’re skirting around the other like strangers and the next he’s building us a fucking pillow fort and making me breakfast and walking around shirtless and I just, something in me was yelling to jump his bones! So I did! And here we are; I’m freaking the fuck out because I might have just ruined one of the only friendships that hasn’t yet gone _there_ all because you people don’t believe in booking flights before eight AM and it’s ridiculous how hot he is! What else is there to say?”

“Well,” Lizzie harrumphs, hands stationing over her hips. “That’s interesting.”

“Interesting? I just told you I’m basically molting and all you can say is ‘ _that’s interesting_?’”

Lizzie glares pointedly. “It’s  _interesting_  because Scarlett, that man has been in love with you for years.”

It’s five in the morning, so the possibility of her and Lizzie getting lost in translation runs ridiculously high. “Wait, what?”

There’s a smile breaking out over Lizzie’s face, like she’s six and it’s Christmas and she knows the results of Santa’s visit to the house are awaiting her. “Dude, yes,” she whispers excitedly. “I mean, I’m not surprised that you haven’t been able to see it because you wouldn’t know love if it whacked you over the head with a baseball bat,  _sorry_ , but he’s smitten like a little baby kitten.”

Scarlett’s ears are ringing. “I don’t—”

“Of course  _you_  don’t. I do. I’ve got legally perfect eyesight, baby, and he loves you.”

“Liz,” Scarlett says through ground teeth. “If you’re fucking with me right now…”

 “I am not fucking with you!” Lizzie laughs, pulling herself together when she’s met with the likely terrifying – and terrified – expression on Scarlett’s face. She rests a hand on Scarlett’s shoulder. “I’m not fucking with you, babe. He asks me every single summer when we get here if you’re seeing anybody. He’s told me before that he’s pretty sure you’re his soulmate. I’ve seen every single birthday card you’ve sent him since you two became friends because he keeps them in a binder in his at-home desk so he always has them. Scar, I’ve never heard him talk about a girl the way he talks about you, and I’ve heard him talk about a lot of girls.”

She wants to believe Lizzie, she does. Lizzie’s got no reason to lie to her about this. But there’s something about it that feels super middle school, hearing it all secondhand, that plants the seed of doubt in her stomach. “That doesn’t mean he’s in love with me.”

“That is exactly what it means.”

“If he was in love with me, he would have made a move.”

Lizzie’s eyes cut towards Scarlett’s chest, one of her eyebrows arching. “And what would you call last night? Friendly relations between Denmark and Germany?”

“I’m talking about before.”

“Look,” Lizzie says, throwing both of her hands up. “It is too early to for me crack the Renner riddle. I don’t know why he didn’t make a move before; maybe it was because he still needed to get the last little bit of playboy out of his system before he switched to you full time, maybe it was because you were always hot on some other boy’s heels and he didn't wanna interfere. But if my information helps uncomplicate your dilemma, then…there it is.”

Scarlett takes a deep breath, exhaling shallowly. “Me. You’re sure he feels that way about me?”

Lizzie nods. “Positive.”

“He told me that he’s never been with anybody who he wanted to give the world to.”

“Oh my god, Scarlett, have you never seen a single romance movie in your life? That’s what the guy  _always_  says to the girl he’s in love with when he doesn’t know how she feels.” She pauses, face scrunching up. “Jesus, he said that to you? Whatta fucking sap.”

“Do not tell me I’ve never seen a romance movie; I sat through three weeks of Dear John on a fucking loop when you and Aaron broke up.”

“We do not say the Dark Lord’s name in this household.”

“What the fuck do I do?”

“You refer to him by any nickname one would refer to Voldemort—”

“ _Not fucking Aaron_ ,” Scarlett hisses through gritted teeth, rapidly losing her patience for this conversation. “Renner.”

Lizzie lifts both hands in mock arrest. “I cannot help you there, mama.”

“You know, it’s the least you could do after ambushing me.”

“You’re welcome,” Lizzie says, reaching out and patting Scarlett on the shoulder awkwardly. “Now get back in there, champ.”

“And do what?”

“Wake him up with a blowjob, confess your undying love – I don’t fucking know! But whatever you do, you are not allowed to tell him that we had this conversation. I swore on Beary the Bear that I wouldn’t ever breathe a word to you about any of it.”

Scarlett’s face flattens in a deadpan. “Beary the Bear? Really, Liz?”

“Leave me alone, I was five.” She then pushes Scarlett back in the direction of the door. “Get back in there. I’ll come up with some spectacular lie to save your ass. You owe me, though. For the lie _and_ for letting me get that close to Renner naked without a fucking warning. I’ll be scarred for life.”

“Yeah, yeah, you don’t want trash duty. Got it.”

Lizzie swats her on the ass when she turns around and retreats back into the bedroom.  

There’s not a lot that Scarlett hasn’t scheduled and planned out in advance, therefore there’s not a lot that comes as a surprise. Jeremy Renner being in love with her? The biggest fucking blind spot of her life. She wouldn’t have put money on that because she’s not a betting woman, especially when she’s sure she’ll lose.

But Lizzie’s got no reason to lie to her, and the faster her brain tries to wrap around it, the more it starts to add up. She leans up against the closed bedroom door once she’s back inside, the margins of the curtains starting to fail at hiding the sunlight behind them and revealing shadows and silhouettes under the rumpled duvet to be a sleeping pile of a man. She watches him, adrenaline from being caught and Lizzie’s lovely confession causing her heart to play the Tower of Terror along the column of her spine – one look at him and it goes shooting straight to the ground.

Instead of crawling back into bed with him, she opts to take her and her incredibly loud thoughts onto the balcony off of the master bedroom that looks over the water.

It’s been awhile since she’s seen the sun, almost forgotten what it’s looked like in the midst of the thunderstorm that’s swirled up so much of her time and energy and sent her completely scattered out of frame. It leaves her to collect the pieces, all scattered out in the fragments of sunlight beginning to bounce off the water in the distance. Scarlett balls up in one of the Adirondack chairs, hugging her knees to her chest as she watches the waves break, white crests being lapped up by dark water out in the deep.

Jeremy was in love with her.

Jeremy _is_ in love with her.

It’s not like this is the worst possible thing that could happen.

She just doesn’t know what it means, for her, for them, for the rest of her trip. Lizzie and the rest of the travelling circus have arrived, hitting the resume button for her and she doesn’t know where that leaves her and Jeremy. Does it leave them anywhere at all? Or do they just dissolve like the sea foam when it bubbles up on shore and gets left behind by waves sucked back out to sea?

Scarlett watches the sunrise alone, wind whistling in her ears and twisting her hair into even more knots than previously. _Jeremy’s in love with me._

_Loving him wouldn't be hard._

Some indiscernible amount of time later, she hears the door to the balcony opening behind her and it scares her so badly that she feels the physical loss of nine years from her lifespan. “You scared me,” she accuses, hand clutched to the fabric of the shirt near her heart when she whips around.

Jeremy’s leaning up against the door, his hair still mussed from sleep (and where she’d kept her fingers knotted in it as he went down on her somewhere around two in the morning) and a lazy smile painted on his face. “Renner: two. Scarlett: one.”

She rolls her eyes because she can’t help herself, turning back to watch the water. “What’re you doing out here, sweetheart?” Jeremy asks as he closes the door behind him, stepping fully out onto the balcony.

“Got woken up,” she answers succinctly. “Didn’t wanna wake you, too. Just…watching the sun come up.”

“North Carolina does get the pretty sunrises.”

He blocks her view when he walks up to the edge of the balcony, resting both arms on the railing as he looks out at the ocean beyond them. She knows it’s not on purpose, but now that he’s here, he’s all she can keep her eyes on: his tanned skin, the family crest tattooed on his shoulder, the veins in his arms, the red scratches on his back she’d put there the night before.

It’s like she’s traveled back in time to that small window of time junior year, where all she could do was hopelessly stare at him with little hearts fluttering around her head.

“If I ask you something, would you be honest with me?” she asks quietly, hardly able to hold it in.

Jeremy looks over his shoulder at her. “Aren’t I always?”

Her hand knots up in her hair, the heel of her palm resting along the curve of her cheek. “Was last night convenience?”

He’s puzzled, turning around completely and pressing his back into the railing while leaving his arms outstretched along the top. “Convenience?”

“Yeah. You know…it was me and you alone in the house, and there’s all kinds of weird fucking energy from that storm, and there’s probably a planet in retrograde and—”

“Stop,” he cuts her off. “I know what you’re about to ask me. That’s not you.”

“What? Convenient?”

“Jesus H. Christ, Scar,” he swears under his breath. “No. You’re…you’ve been my best friend since college.” He studies her for a minute – she can’t read him at all, and he of course, reads her entirely wrong. “Do you regret last night or somethin’? ‘Cause if that’s what you’re trying to tell me, that’s all you have to say. We can do that; wipe it off the slate and forget it ever happened.”

“No,” she says quickly, probably too quickly. She can’t really help it, though. It’s the indifferent way he says that to her that scares her, that makes her think that _yes,_ she is just convenient, that she's going to lose him the second she got used to the weight of him in her hands, that maybe Lizzie’s got the rose-colored glasses permanently glued to her head and wouldn’t know the difference between a marriage proposal and someone tying their shoe. “I don’t regret last night.”

“Okay, so why are you asking me if I fucked you out of convenience?”

“Because.” She stretches her legs out, rising up to her feet. “We’ve been best friends since college. We’ve been alone plenty of times since then. Why’d you wait to do that last night? Why not before?”

“I meant what I said the other night: if one of us is gonna find somebody, you’re gonna be the first to do it. Homewrecker’s not really a good look on me.”

“Hey, I’ve been single many times over the years.”

“Your idea of being single is a fucking joke, Scarlett Johansson.” She rolls her eyes.

“Look,” she says, because now isn't the time to discuss her otherwise large failure of a love life. “I’m trying to tell you that I see you now.”

He looks at her skeptically. “I see you too, Scar. It’s broad daylight.”

Well, she never did bank on words being her saving grace in any of this. They’ve failed her before and they’ll fail her now. “No, moron.” She takes another step closer, only a few inches difference between him and her. “I mean that I _see_ you. Whatever your reasons were, are, for anything that you did. I see you. I get it. You found me first and you didn’t want to push your luck. It’s why you never made your move, wasn’t it?”

“I don’t…”

“Jeremy,” she whispers over the sounds of the waves in their rearview. “Last night made me happy. These last few days with you have made me happy. You make me happy and whatever it is that you're willing to give me will make me happy, too.”

He begins to register what she’s saying – and thank god, because she doesn’t know any other way to say _I know you’re in love with me and I think I could love you like that too if you’d just let me_ without putting Beary the Bear’s life at risk. His hands settle over her hips, guiding her so his chest is brushing up against her t-shirt.

“You want the world?” he asks her, the raspy edge in his voice like lightning rolling down her spine. “I’ll give it to you.”

“As long as you know that I’m at _least_ thirty percent unhinged on a good day.”

“This’ll change things between us,” he warns her, as if she hasn’t spent the last thirty-something hours wracking her brain of the very same thing and all the consequences that could follow.

“Let them. I don’t care.”

“Who are you and what have you done with Scarlett?”

“Not a thing,” she teases. She’s not wrong – whoever she is when she’s here on this beach, it’s her. Not who the schedule or her fears dictate her into being. Something about Sunset Beach strips her down into whoever or whatever it is that she can be whenever she lets control fall from her fingertips, and relinquishing the grip has freed her hands for him to walk right into. “I’ve always been here.”

“Yeah, you have, haven’t you?” He buries his hands in her hair when he kisses her and she happily falls right into him.

“I just wanna be with you,” she whispers when they break for air. 

“Whatever the lady wants.”

She might only have another twenty-something days ahead of her where she can have this, his lips on hers, but it feels like a lifetime stretching out like the ocean straight ahead, miles and miles and endless depths waiting to be explored. The unknown, for once, makes her heart swell hopefully in her chest. “I know,” she admits, the slow smile revealing itself. “I’m glad we’re on the same page. I’ve read that makes for a strong relationship.”

His eyes turn the same color as the water stretching out beyond them, sunlight hitting their surface and exploding into brilliant light as he finally clues in. “You…you fuckin’ devil,” he swears, scoffing a laugh. “Did you plan all that out while waiting for me to wake up?”

Scarlett shakes her head. “Don’t need to plan when you already know.”

“Let me fucking guess: Liz?”

“Spare Beary the Bear,” she pouts, snaking her arms around his waist and pulling him flush to her. “He’s an innocent bystander in all of this.”

“Fuck that stupid stuffed critter.”

“I can arrange for other things for you to fuck.”

He arches an eyebrow. “Can you now?”

“You’ll just have to do it quietly. The peanut gallery is now officially downstairs ready for their summer fun to begin.”

Jeremy groans, his face falling down into her shoulder. “There goes _our_ fun.”

“Hey.” She nudges him back up so he’s eye-to-eye with her. “We'll make it work." Whatever _it_  happens to be, they both know that it goes beyond the parameters of sex, way beyond just the here and now. 

“Cross your heart?”

“I’m not hoping to die, not when you’re promising to give orgasms.” She offers him a tiny smile, head tilting to the side and blonde hair spilling down her shoulder over his arms. “But the sentiment’s there.”

“Let me give you the world,” he whispers in her ear, and suddenly, nothing else really matters.


End file.
